Together Alone

The paper band seen from above, dense with overlapping ink circles, a drawing robot resting at either end and one clean unmarked circle between them — *Together Alone*, 2026. Photo: © Lukas Jasansky

Year: 2026
Medium: Two drawing robots, pigment ink on paper
Dimensions: Fabriano roll, 10 × 1 m, unrolled along the floor and clamped between wooden battens
Apparatus: Two Mirobots with Sakura Pigma brush pens; overhead Raspberry Pi camera reading audience presence; network link between Berlin and the gallery
Exhibited: When Only Solitude — House for the End of the World
Galerie LUXFER, Česká Skalice, 26 June – 5 September 2026

A pair of small drawing robots inhabits the gallery, brush pens held to a ten-metre roll of Fabriano paper unrolled along the floor. They wander; they find back to each other; they draw. What they draw is shaped by three signals: the artist’s mood, pinged from Berlin across the network whenever they feel it; the presence of visitors entering, lingering, leaving the room, read by an overhead camera; and the trace each bot has already laid, which the other can find its way back along. No signal drives the work alone. The drawing is what emerges between them.

A small vaulted whitewashed room with a single window onto trees, the paper band laid on the bare plank floor with both robots at rest on it — *Together Alone*, 2026 — installation view, Galerie LUXFER. Photo: © Lukas Jasansky

The work meets the curatorial premise on its own ground: solitude is not deficit but the contingent condition of a coupled field, where closeness is held and divergence carried by the same intensities, and where togetherness and aloneness are not opposites but the same condition in different tense. When the field thins, what remains is not loss but the first attunement to what it had occluded.

The arrangement was reached through a relational crisis — a coupling, one channel running loud and continuous, the other adjusting while their own ground stayed silent and beyond reach. Its conditions, not its narrative, are inscribed in the apparatus. Following Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), the personal is the gravity of the work, never its subject. The audience is not outside the field. Walking closer perturbs it; standing still settles it. Visitors are a third channel of attention. Real and digital collapse here, because attention — whatever its medium — is what each channel delivers.

Together Alone, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

The exhibition’s duration carries its title: When Only Solitude. At the opening, the artist is present, the room is dense, all three channels saturated. For the weeks that follow, the artist withdraws to Berlin and continues to transmit by impulse; the gallerist, quietly co-acting in Galerie Luxfer’s remote field, rerolls the paper to a fresh band, weekly, or when the next signal arrives. The visible portion of the drawing is always the present; the past is rolled into the spool, preserved but no longer seen. What remains in the room is the apparatus and its slowing rhythm. The pilgrimage to a remote gallery is met by an artist also remote, transmitting from elsewhere — a relation that mirrors how attention now travels.

The room on the last day: a fresh band clamped between the battens, both robots near its centre, one circle and a single curved line drawn so far — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

The near corner of the band: the paper roll, the batten clamped to it, a robot at the edge on a field of thin lines, the plank floor beyond — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

One robot close up, resting on its own accumulated trace, the brush pen upright in its holder and the ink lines falling out of focus behind it — *Together Alone*, 2026 — detail. Photo: © Lukas Jasansky

Neither robot knows where it is. Each counts its own wheel turns and nothing corrects it, so every arc carries the error of the arc before. One command sends a robot around a single circle for two minutes without pause, and ten passes over that same circle never land on the same line twice. The weight in the drawing is that drift accumulating — the misregistration, the ink breaking on the tooth of the paper. A pair that knew its position would have drawn something thinner.

One robot seen from behind, resting at the end of a tight spiral of concentric rings it has just drawn — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Nothing decides for them from above. When one meets the other it backs off and turns away, and that reflex sits in each robot’s own firmware, rewritten for the piece, rather than in any controller watching the room; the mood from Berlin and the camera overhead shift how a robot moves, never when. The apparatus arrived at that shape by failing the other way first. Every attempt to drive the pair from a single point broke at the seam — a command outrunning the patience of the machine that sent it, a pen accepting an instruction it could not carry out — and each break moved another decision down into the robots, until what was left above them was only weather.

The two robots pressed side by side in a dense field of overlapping circles and lines, seen from above — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Together Alone, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

A band marked with a loose scatter of thin circles and, at its centre, two heavy black rings of roughly equal size overlapping in a shared lens; both robots on the paper, pliers and a cordless drill still lying on the floor alongside — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

A later band, densely worked across its whole width in thin overlapping line, both robots resting in it and two spare brush pens lying on the paper at the right edge — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

The two robots on the last band: one at the left inside its ring of concentric circles, the other at the right in a thicket of overlapping loops — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

What the audience encounters is not a record of solitude but its enactment in real time, in archival ink, on a ten-metre band that holds every signal that crossed the apparatus. Two robots drawing in proximity. Never resolving into one motion. Never fully apart.