Together Alone

The paper band on the plank floor between its rolls and battens, dense with overlapping ink circles, the two robots left and right of centre and a single heavier circle between them, crossed by thinner lines — *Together Alone*, 2026. Photo: © Lukas Jasansky

Year: 2026
Medium: Two drawing robots, pigment ink on paper
Dimensions: Fabriano roll, 10 × 1.5 m, unrolled along the floor and clamped between wooden battens
Apparatus: Two Mirobots with Sakura Pigma brush pens; a Raspberry Pi with a camera, low on the gallery wall; 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

Two small robots stand on a roll of Fabriano paper ten metres long and a metre and a half wide, only a part of it unrolled along the floor and held between wooden battens, each with a Sakura Pigma brush pen pressed to the paper. They wander, they find back to each other, and they draw. What they draw is shaped by the mood of the artist, sent from Berlin whenever he feels it, by every touch, of the edge or of each other, and by the ink each robot has already laid down. A robot that finds a line follows it, and cannot tell whether the line is the other's or its own. 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 title comes from a feeling, of being close to someone and still alone, and of being pulled off course by whoever else is in the room. It turns round Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, her phrase for people who are connected all the time and alone in it. Hannah Arendt kept the two conditions apart: loneliness, she wrote, shows itself most sharply in company with others, while solitude is the state in which one keeps oneself company (two-in-one, a self in conversation with itself). On the paper, the two-in-one is a pair of robots.

The work's first figure was two rings. A robot sent round the same circle ten times drew a bold ring that went nowhere; set down beside it and sent round again, it drew a second, and the two became Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled" (Double Portrait), two circles touching. Up close the overlap is no line at all but a bundle of passes that never land on each other, the ink graining against the paper, a richness possible only through imperfection.

Together Alone, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

The robots were to be left to it: let the work do the work. At first they would not be left. The computer driving them gave up on a robot that was still crossing the paper. A pen said yes to going down, never said it was done, and after that the robot answered nothing, but only in a certain interval after it was switched on. The motors held on when nothing moved, warm to the touch, and most likely drained the batteries while the robots stood still. Each time the artist looked for the cause rather than a restart. The first answer came from the internet, where nobody calculates in advance how long a message may take: you wait until it arrives, and the robot's own word that it had finished became the thing to wait for. The choreography went the same way, out of the computer and into the robots themselves, as muscle memory. A 3D printer executes a shape computed for it in advance. These robots sense the edge, each other and the ink, and answer on their own; the computer no longer tells them where to go, it sets a mood. That is an autonomy a printer never had.

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

When a robot touches the edge (the rolls at either end, the battens along the sides) or the other robot, it backs off and swerves away: the whisker that felt the touch decides which way, and chance decides how far. Lucretius called this swerve clinamen, the small deviation without which falling atoms would never meet. One robot carries the artist's mood from Berlin, in three settings. Reaching, it draws long, slow arcs across the paper; in flow, a circle that narrows inwards, a spiral of retrospection that never quite winds to a point; in anxiety, short circles that jerk.

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

The two robots side by side on a field of overlapping circles and lines, seen close and at an angle — *Together Alone*, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Together Alone, 2026. Courtesy of the artist

Neither robot can know that the two of them touched at the same moment. A coordinator that listens to nothing but their bumpers can, and when both report a touch within the same second, each other or the edge, they begin the Paarungstanz (the mating dance): each backs off fourteen centimetres, turns a quarter, and draws circles twenty-eight centimetres across, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled" (Double Portrait) drawn by two robots that met by accident, two clocks set to the same time and bound to drift apart. The quarter-turn gives the circles a slight chance of touching as the clocks do, and the tolerance that absorbs the network's jitter lets them meet more often than they would without it. Perfect lovers, far from perfect, and they could not be more perfect. If what they touch together is the edge, the dance begins with the audience. The mating ritual cannot be a reflex, it is a highly choreographed act in all species.

A band marked with a loose scatter of thin circles and two heavier rings, one near the top and a darker one at the lower right built up from many passes; both robots on the paper, pliers and a cordless drill 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

At the opening the artist was in the room. For the weeks after, the mood came from Berlin, and the paper advanced a band at a time, what had been drawn rolling into the spool, kept and no longer seen.

The roll unrolled along the plank floor: two finished drawings side by side, each a dense field of overlapping circles and lines, both robots at rest at the right edge of the left one — *Together Alone*, 2026. Photo: © Elana Katz