Caution Bot Crossing brings into focus the tensions currently unfolding between the widespread automation of tasks and the actions still carried out by humans.

Autonomous cars (Hyperhighways), systems for tracking flows (Reflective Automation), tools for measuring and quantifying ecosystems (HIVE Index), automated logistics warehouses (G16 and Caution Bot Crossing): all promise precision and efficiency.

As these machines appear to gain autonomy, they also seem to acquire a form of agency of their own (Your Phone Needs To Cool Down), blurring the boundaries between assistance, delegation and the gradual loss of control over our decisions. Throughout the exhibition, the artists explore a mechanical, repetitive and geometric aesthetic drawn directly from machines and algorithms themselves.

The Hyperhighways series appropriates the visual codes of road signage to imagine a future in which humans and autonomous vehicles must coexist. On these new signs, QR codes, CAPTCHAs and pictograms guide our movements and shape our behaviours. To produce these compositions, fragmentin developed a custom software tool that automatically generates the content of the signs. The artists thus become both the architects of the system and the curators of its outputs, selecting from countless visual variations those that resonate and deserve to be materialised.

HIVE Index, created in collaboration with Apian – A Ministry of Bees, is a sculpture accompanied by a series of films that critically examine the use of digital technologies in beekeeping.

Presented in standby mode within the exhibition space, the sculpture takes the form of a mechanical hand that seems to close in on a beehive, highlighting the logics of capture, control and extraction embedded in capitalist technologies. At the tip of each finger, small screens inspired by speculative stock-market interfaces calculate, in real time, the value of the hive according to opaque criteria.

The films show the sculpture activated in different contexts, each time hosting a different type of hive on its base, from traditional to industrial models. Each film therefore tells a different story about beekeeping infrastructures. More broadly, HIVE Index addresses the quantification of ecosystems, where complex organic behaviours are reduced to measurable data.

A large-format image serves as a backdrop to the installation. It reveals a machine’s-eye view of honeybees, with an algorithm detecting food exchanges between them.

G16, an interactive artwork and semi-automatic machine, exposes, through sixteen variables, the social deadlock produced by the forced coexistence of human and machine labour, particularly within automated warehouses, where technologies intended to optimise processes end up generating new forms of absurdity. Visitors are invited to manipulate the motorised sliders in an attempt to regulate the system, gradually observing how it resists any stable form of balance.

Your Phone Needs To Cool Down reveals another kind of absurdity: that of a smartphone confronted with the effects of global warming, alternately immobilised by overheating or searching online for ways to ensure its own survival. Placed inside a glass cube heated by thermal lamps, in an artificial climate inspired by terrariums, the smartphone takes the place of the reptile.

Together, these works expose the internal contradictions of an automation that claims to simplify the world while, at times, making it more opaque, unstable or incoherent.

Caution Bot Crossing thus offers an immersion into a world in which technologies no longer simply execute tasks, but also perform, influence and sometimes disrupt our behaviours. The exhibition invites us to reconsider how we now share space — physical, decisional and perceptual — with automated systems that silently transform our environments and imaginaries. At the same time, it questions new forms of co-creation between artists and machines, where human intention enters into dialogue with algorithmic autonomy.

The new work Caution Bot Crossing (2026), which gives the exhibition its title, is composed of three elements. Precise and enigmatic tyre marks grid the floor, appearing as the visual trace of the repetitive movements of an autonomous machine. They connect the works to one another, as if each had been positioned by a bot whose presence is attested only by these marks on the ground. Each trace remains ambiguous: is it the product of an automated system, or a hand-made imitation carefully produced by the artists?

On the central wall, a painting reprises these same motifs, turning the tracks into both a wall-based artwork and a scenographic element extending across the floor.

In front of it, the title Caution Bot Crossing appears on an industrial safety sign, folded, overturned and left on the floor at the entrance to the gallery, like the remnant of a now-obsolete warning system. Echoing the Hyperhighways series, this sign appropriates the language of industrial signage to point to a shift in responsibility: in automated environments, bots — whether mechanical or computational — are not designed to take care of humans, but to ensure the uninterrupted functioning of a system.

In this context, what role is the human still expected to play?