Appropriating the visioning of an autonomous vacuum cleaner, Drone Roam Roomba documents the vacant home of my late parents, an alternative to the estate agent's space-expanding photographs. The drone machine wanders the empty rooms, scanning and searching, bumping into walls and doors like a mechanical poltergeist. In defiance to anticipated digital faultlessness, flaws and insufficiencies are revealed as the device is caught in loops and is wedged under objects, the spatial glitching rendered on the screen.

The spatial survey is rendered as an artefactual experience, the hyper-pixilated outcome troubling the threshold of space and screen. Space is flattened to blocks of colour that surface the screen. The viewer is subjected to the seeing of the machine, as what machine vision ‘sees’ is not space, but the image of space. Images are no longer mere images, but an interfacing with the nonhuman.

Drone Roam Roomba was presented in the All Tomorrow’s Interiors exhibition, as part of Architecture Fringe 2023