State Machine

Honourable mention @ Competition for a national pavilion of Montenegro at Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. An interactive installation made up of visual archives of Montenegro with a central protagonist, a robotic AI in the process of filtering, sorting, pattern matching and extracting insights from the archive. The wall mounted robot will move continuously up and down the gallery picking and placing images from the archive onto the gallery wall. Over the five month period of the exhibition the machine will continuously sort and catalogue a vast photographic archive that reflects on the social, political and geological histories of Montenegro. Meanwhile visitors’ movements and their visual attention will be tracked and measured using sensors providing data for the machine learning model. By observing how images influence visitor behaviour we anticipate extracting meaningful and potentially unexpected insights from the public’s engagement with various Montenegrin Image Archives. At the same time we invite an international audience to construct their own understanding of Montenegro by exploring visual archives, interactive data projections and robotic performance.

Though our title State Machines refers to contemporary questions about national identity, it also has a second algorithmic meaning referring the logic our robot will use (hierarchical state machines) to make decisions between various tasks (e.g., idle -> pick up frame -> travel along gallery wall -> place frame on wall). Accessing thousands of available archival images within the gallery, our robot will organise an ever-changing collection of archive images on the walls of ArteNova.