ECHO AND NARCISSUS

Echo and Narcissus is a robotic installation that explores imitation, feedback, and the instability of self within machine systems.

Two industrial robot arms face each other and continuously respond to one another in real time. Rather than executing a fixed choreography, their movement emerges from reinforcement learning. Each arm is trained to track, mirror, and anticipate the other, producing an evolving exchange that never fully resolves. Leadership shifts back and forth. Action becomes reaction, and reaction becomes action.

The work draws from the myth of Echo and Narcissus, where repetition and reflection become conditions of being. In this installation, both roles are shared. Each machine listens and repeats while also projecting its own motion back into the system. The result is a closed loop of perception in which origin disappears and only relation remains.

The choreography is shaped by reward structures that favor proximity, synchronization, hesitation, and near-contact. The arms learn to hover at the edge of interaction, producing gestures that feel intentional but never settle into fixed meaning. Small deviations in timing and motion accumulate into emergent behavior, giving the system a shifting, unstable presence.

There is no beginning or end. The piece runs continuously, generating an endless sequence of interactions. Viewers encounter the work midstream, observing a system that is always already in motion.

Echo and Narcissus extends an ongoing practice centered on generative systems, robotics, and machine perception. Here, instability is not an error but a material condition. Expression emerges from imperfect imitation, and meaning arises through the feedback loop between system and observer.