Created by AATB, and commissioned by Commissioned by EPFL / Archizoom, NO/NC (Normally Open, Normally Closed) is public installation where four autonomously moving obstacles are constantly changing position and occasionally assembling into a temporary, enclosing structure, forcing passers-by to walk around and between them. This pseudo-intelligent system shape-shifts and as it covers space and redirects its environmental dynamics, almost ends up engulfing its human visitors.
Intelligent machines everywhere, it is our built environment itself that is moving under our own feet, the walls are alive and we cannot be sure if we can trust them.
AATB
The walls of the installation take on an almost ghostly presence. They change constantly and never stop moving, as if they now had a will of their own: a kind of autonomy, their own logic and their own instinct for survival.
AATB
Installation is comprised of four collaborative robot arms (cobot) from the Rainbow Robotics RB Series alongside the the control box located under each arm housing the main computer, power supply, safety systems, and I/O control boards that drive the robotic arm. On the front, the handheld touchscreen display is attached and a curtain is suspended from each arm.
NO/NC was commissioned by Archizoom EPFL and le Pôle Culture (VPI) and shown at EPFL campus alongside the exhibition “Do Robots Dream of Construction Sites?”. Photos by Solène Inès Hoffmann.
