2018 · exhibition
Two KUKA arms. Six methods, authored worldwide. One studio executing all of them.
For the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, FABB built and operated a live robotic fabrication workshop for A School of Schools. Unlike the biennial’s exhibited works, this was a work-in-progress by design: raw material and tooling were staged on one side of the space and, over six weeks, consumed, transformed, and built into their final state in full view.
FABB developed the instructionSet — a protocol for authoring a digital-making method, then documenting how every re-execution of it drifts. Six teams around the world each authored one; over six weeks, one method per week, FABB executed all six on its own floor, on its own robots, live for six weeks.
The gap was the work. Every set arrived built for other machines, other materials, other constraints; FABB re-derived each one to run on two KUKA arms — and the protocol was designed to document those deviations rather than hide them. The method loop even ran both directions. By teaching, we learn wasn’t a theme. It was the operating principle — authorship and execution deliberately split so the interpretation between them became the artifact.
The process was captured twice — a multi-screen installation documenting the instructionSets, and a second film following the space itself as its staged materials were consumed and rebuilt over the run. The biennial’s own documentary program, directed by Alexandre Humbert, followed DDI as part of a series on lifelong learning — filmed for the smartphone as a format experiment that was, back in 2018, genuinely new.
