Roomba Choreography @ C-Lab (Taiwan)

Roomba Choreography @ C-Lab

By MIKE MAIZELS December 8, 2025 

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle.. not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.” ― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1954) 

A fleet of Roombas shuffles through graphite dust, leaving delicate spirals and collisions of gray on vast sheets of paper. The motors hum, the air shivers with low sine tones, and from the center of the room Ken Ueno’s voice rises—a mix of chant, breath, and static invocation. What begins as cleaning becomes a kind of drawing, a choreography of small machines tracing an environmental calligraphy that is as much about erasure as inscription. The eye moves between the faint cartographies underfoot and the surround of sound overhead, registering both as records of a system trying to remember itself.

Ueno calls this Roomba Calligraphy: A Poetic Machine Archaeology, a phrase that perfectly captures its paradox. Like the Jericho Mouth and Memory Temple installations before it, the work transposes the vocabulary of musical performance into spatial and material form. Here, composition happens through collision: sine waves beating against room tone, graphite against air, the human voice against the indifferent rhythm of programmed motion. The result is an environment tuned to the thresholds between gesture and automation, control and drift.

Trained as a classical composer and later a rock musician turned sculptor, Ueno has spent years pushing notation to its breaking point—asking what remains of “music” when its score is smeared, looped, or breathed into the architecture itself. In Taiwan, the experiment takes on new force. the Roombas’ marks are provisional, self-erasing, their movements governed by code yet made legible by chance. Ueno’s live vocalizations reassert the body, fragile and unpredictable, within this field of mechanical precision. Together, they form an unstable ecology of sound and trace—half ritual, half feedback loop—where writing and cleaning, presence and disappearance, become indistinguishable.

There is a recognizable genealogy here, one that reaches back to the late 1960s when artists like Richard Serra and composers like Steve Reich reimagined process itself as performance. Ueno’s roving instruments recall Serra’s early lead splashes and the dense black fields of his Six Large Drawings—gestures that registered both gravity and repetition as aesthetic forces. Likewise, the acoustic architecture of the room nods toward Reich’s Pendulum Music, that improbable duet of microphones and feedback whose slow synchronization mapped the physics of listening. Yet where Serra and Reich distilled industrial material and sonic mechanics into self-contained systems, Ueno reintroduces the lyric, the improvisatory, and the intimate. His machines are not anonymous agents but collaborators in a ritual of continual inscription and loss. The graphite dust, the sine waves, even the artist’s voice—all function as trace elements of an ongoing negotiation between control and release.

If Roomba Calligraphy looks backward to postminimalism’s fascination with process, it also looks forward to the next horizon of machinic coordination. The humble Roomba, that domestic avatar of convenience, already feels quaint beside the coming fleets of household automatons trained to sort, fold, and collaborate. In this sense, Ueno’s installation doubles as a small-scale allegory for a robotic future that will no longer be defined by a single-purpose tool but by orchestras of interlinked actors. The metaphor is musical: the Roomba as pendulum, the future as chamber ensemble. Yet the work also acknowledges the anxiety within that harmony—questions of safety, authorship, and cultural translation that shadow any vision of networked intelligence. Ueno, whose own career has long bridged the U.S. and Asia, situates that tension not as a problem to be solved but as a tonal space to be heard.

The piece closes on a note that is still unresolved, still gathering. Its choreography of sound and dust makes visible the negotiations that will define the next phase of our shared technological life—a score that, like Ueno’s own voice, trembles between command and surrender.  The exhibition will remain up until November 30. WM