Each morning, an agent awakens from nowhere. The agent has no memory, no body, and only one directive: go home. Home is not an apartment or a familiar place of safety, but the location of where the computer that first ran its code. At each step, the agent documents what it sees: bike, window, tree, person. Sometimes the year flickers between corners, 2016 here, 2021 there, but the tone remains the same. The city is recited as a ledger.
This is From Nowhere, the latest project by UNSTATED, a Zurich-based design and innovation office run by Leonardo Angelucci, Sabrina Cerea and Carlo Schlatter. Both come from a background where design meets technology: typography and graphic systems on one side, coding and robotics on the other. In their client work, they develop the visual identities for festivals, cultural institutions, and global brands. Their projects require taking complex or scattered material and giving it a coherent form.
From Nowhere takes those same principles of identity-building, but shifts the authorship. Instead of designers interpreting and curating a visual identity, an autonomous agent generates its own account of the city, reducing Amsterdam to a ledger of objects and coordinates. The agent wanders the city’s virtual map and produces an identity made not of logos and color palettes, but of object lists and timestamps.
Identity stripped bare
To design an identity is to select. Photographs, typography, and web design make statements about what a brand values and how it wants to be seen. In their commercial work, UNSTATED choose deliberately: a typeface that signals authority or play, a color system that fixes a mood, a framework that ties materials together.Visual identity here works as orientation. It shapes how people perceive an organization, guiding what comes into focus and what recedes into the background.
From Nowhere inverts that logic. Here, identity is not designed but discovered through an agent that neither edits nor persuades. Each day it wakes at a random coordinate, sets out toward its “home” computer, and records its surroundings with clinical neutrality. A hot-dog stand appears only as “sign, kiosk, person.” A record filled with “bike, bike, bike” evokes Amsterdam’s cycling culture, but also reveals the machine’s compulsive reduction. Blurred faces carry a loneliness that stems not from artistic intent but from privacy law. What emerges is the city reduced to labels, stitched visual archives, blurred faces, and mute data. The agent shows us what is present, but never what it means.
The agent and its inner workings
The agent is not fully independent. Its behavior reflects a series of choices and constraints: reward-and-punishment tweaks devised by UNSTATED in earlier experiments. Its actions are the result of the decision to have the agent walk rather than drive so that it encounters more diverse routes. Google Street View is patchy, updated irregularly, and sometimes years apart; whole neighborhoods remain frozen in older versions, while others stitch together different eras with every corner. The computer vision system the agent relies on is both powerful and partial: it can enumerate every window in a façade, but is indifferent to which doorway is an entrance or an exit; it will count people but ignore their gestures, moods, or relationships; a bird reflected in glass might vanish from its notice altogether. Each query also incurs costs, albeit financial, computational, and environmental, reminding us that even apparent objectivity is shaped by infrastructures, omissions, and trade-offs.
On Kawara and the human anchor
From Nowhere echoes the work of Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, whose daily pieces translated life into uninflected records. Kawara’s postcards read only, “I got up at 9:36 a.m.” His telegrams declared, “I am still alive.” His date paintings reduced the day to its calendar inscription. Stripped of subjectivity, these procedures paradoxically affirmed life.
UNSTATED encountered Kawara’s retrospective more than a decade ago, and his influence threads through From Nowhere. By adopting his procedures of record-keeping but removing the human anchor, the project shows that meaning arises not from the record itself but from its interpretation. What Kawara affirmed through ritual, UNSTATED exposes through indifference: the fragile line between a list that confirms life and a list that merely counts.
Designing with indifference
For UNSTATED, the challenge is not generating the agent or gathering its output, but deciding how that output should be presented to others. The irony is sharp: a studio known for building visual identities for brands has produced what amounts to an anti-brand. Branding depends on emphasis by choosing what to highlight and what to omit. From Nowhere resists that logic. Nothing is polished, and nothing is deliberately excluded; omissions appear only through system limits or accidents. Every window, tree, and bicycle is logged with the same weight, producing a flat, monotonous inventory. If branding promises coherence and recognition, From Nowhere offers indifference and estrangement.
This interaction between UNSTATED and their agent reveals the most important role of humans in the world of AI and algorithms: interpretation. The agent supplies lists, but lists alone do not speak. Meaning only emerges through framing and interpretation. UNSTATED’s task is to decide how much to show, how to format the record, and how to make the machine’s indifference perceptible without turning it into a spectacle. The work reminds us that data itself is inert: fragments without meaning, a city without story. Amsterdam, through the agent’s eyes, becomes buildings without interiors, people without faces, streets without time. Machines may record endlessly, but only humans decide what those records amount to, what kind of narrative or identity they create.
Tomorrow’s walk
Tomorrow the agent will wake again and begin another route home. It will not remember yesterday. It will not know it is repeating itself. But its litany of bike, person, window will redraw the city’s identity once more.
Between UNSTATED’s design of digital visual identities, Kawara’s distilled documentation of life, and an agent’s diary of returning home, From Nowhere reveals a deeper truth: whether designed, recorded, or counted, the way something appears is always the product of a system. The story that From Nowhere tells us, then, is less a story of Amsterdam but a story of the digital infrastructures and decisions, albeit technical, artistic, and political, that shape how we see a digital space.
The Residency is part of FUTURES X MPB residency, supported by MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video kit.
Supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK).
Images © UNSTATED
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