“Roomba Calligraphy” is a kinetic installation that explores the tension between automation and gesture, inscription and erasure. Inspired by Cy Twombly’s gestural calligraphy, the work transforms the act of cleaning into calligraphy, and writing into a choreographed interaction between human and machine.
Roombas roam freely across a floor dusted with fine graphite, tracing their paths with swooshes, whorls, and flourishes — a vibrant calligraphy of their own making. This self-sustaining cycle of writing and erasure creates a landscape of fleeting scriptures and sonic decay. The work extends Ueno’s ongoing inquiry into voice, presence, and the finitude of imprints. Each Roomba carries a 3D-printed speaker resonating with slowly gliding sine tones. Their movement produces shifting microtonal beatings, shaped by position and focus, allowing the audience to experience sound as a moving spatial phenomenon — a metaphor for the subjectivity of truth.
At the centre of the room, Ueno vocalises through a megaphone, blending poetic declamations, glossolalia, and raw vocal gestures. His voice serves as a fragile counterpoint to the Roombas’ mechanical precision, imprinting the hallmark of human unpredictability within a field of clockwork regularity. This interplay enacts a machine archaeology of writing — tracing, erasing, and reclaiming expression at the threshold of presence and disappearance.
Ken Ueno, winner of the Rome and Berlin Prizes, is a composer, vocalist, sound artist, and author. His work challenges inherited traditions of music and art, and his wild imagination explodes the boundaries of what is possible. Renowned for his extended vocal techniques, Ueno has performed his vocal concerto with leading orchestras including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Warsaw Philharmonic, and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra.
His installation practice has been presented internationally, with exhibitions at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, MUAC in Mexico City, and the New Vision Arts Festival in Hong Kong. In 2021, his large-scale work Daedalus Drones—a fence-labyrinth animated by a swarm of flying drones—premiered at Asia Society Hong Kong. With deep ties to the city, Ueno has created works for major cultural institutions such as Tai Kwun, Freespace, the Osage Gallery, and Eaton HK. He is Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley.