Year
2018
Tag
Installations
A person enters the room. A machine turns. On a nearby screen, a body becomes an image that a system can follow. The movement is enough to change the encounter: looking at an object becomes the experience of being looked at by it.
Death Inc. placed this exchange inside Design Does, an exhibition at Barcelona’s Design Museum. We modelled the sculpture on a real commercial, AI-assisted sentry weapon. It followed visitors as they moved, bringing an existing military technology into the space between a machine and a body.
2018 · Design Does · Museu del Disseny de Barcelona · Art & Research / Installations.
A 3.7-second silent excerpt from the original Design Does film. Original subtitles remain visible.
A body becomes a target
The installation combined a motorised, 3D-printed structure with a sensing system and a screen. Its rotation made the act of tracking visible. Visitors could see the object change direction in response to their presence; the accompanying image offered another view of the same encounter.
The reference came from systems already reported in use at borders and other guarded sites in several countries. Their capacity to detect and track people made the question immediate. Inside the exhibition, a person could move, but the sculpture continued to address them as something to be located. Detection acquired a direction, a speed and a place in the room.
Death Inc. in the Design Does exhibition: sculpture, visitor and screen.
A visitor beside the rotating sculpture.
The judgement inside the mechanism
The work drew on Ariel Guersenzvaig’s research into autonomous weapon systems and the principle of discrimination. That research gave the installation its central difficulty: detecting a person and understanding the meaning of their presence are different kinds of judgement.
The distinction between capability and permission was central. SIPRI’s 2017 survey describes a fully autonomous firing mode in the Super aEgis II sentry system, while reporting its manufacturer’s statement that customers had configured it to require human authorisation. The possibility of removing that authorisation was already part of the design.
Where responsibility remains
Death Inc. formed part of the exhibition’s question, “Should we allow everything to be automated?” The sculpture detected and followed visitors; it did not reproduce the weapon’s lethal function. The encounter made the delegation of a decision palpable before asking who should be allowed to delegate it.
A machine may carry out an action without explaining the choices that made the action possible. The sculpture returned attention to those choices. Behind a movement that appeared autonomous remained a designed set of relations, and the people responsible for bringing them into being.
How it was made
A fabricated, 3D-printed shell sat on a motorised rotating base. Sensing hardware tracked movement in the exhibition area, while a nearby display showed the system’s view.
Original Death Inc. assembly drawing from the production archive.
References
- Design Does — original exhibition — Final exhibition record.
- Design Does — DDS case study — Exhibition context and original film.
- BCN3D — fabrication of Death Inc. — 3D printing and the moving sculpture.
- SIPRI — Mapping the development of autonomy in weapon systems — 2017 report, pp. 44–46: robotic sentries, deployments and human control.
- Ariel Guersenzvaig — Autonomous Weapon Systems: Failing the Principle of Discrimination — IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2018. Research behind the installation.
A project by Domestic Data Streamers. Images selected from the original project and exhibition archives.
