Embassy: Open-Source Diplomacy Rover

⊕ Autonomous ground platform for distributed remote governance tests

∇ Ground Autonomy as Civic Infrastructure

Embassy is a moving installation that uses a rover format to reflect on access, distance, and public authority. The project borrows visual language from exploration and control systems, then relocates it into civic space where its behavior can be observed directly. Instead of presenting autonomy as a closed technological promise, Embassy frames it as a negotiated condition: the machine moves, records, and responds within visible limits. Its presence is less about spectacle and more about method. By operating as a small distributed device rather than a centralized platform, Embassy asks how technical infrastructures can remain legible, accountable, and open to collective interpretation.

In use, Embassy unfolds through short cycles of movement, sensing, pause, and transmission. This rhythm keeps the system readable for visitors while showing how every action depends on context: terrain, crowd, timing, and available signal. Interruption and slowness are not treated as failures but as part of the work�s public grammar. The project therefore links technical behavior to curatorial form, turning infrastructural limits into shared, visible conditions.

Within the broader research of Suez Canal Republic, Embassy occupies a specific role: it tests how tools associated with remote command and strategic observation can be reconfigured as open, inspectable, and civic-facing devices. The work does not reproduce military or institutional control formats at scale; it reduces them, exposes them, and places them under public scrutiny. In this sense, Embassy is not only a single installation but an infrastructural hypothesis that can be iterated across sites and read through changing social conditions.

↔ Reference translation

From Diagram ↦ Field

The reference model introduces Embassy as a technical lineage, while the following documentation shows its shift into a situated public device shaped by context, movement, and encounter. What begins as a recognizable engineering template is translated into a curatorial instrument that behaves in front of an audience, in real time, under real constraints.

This passage from blueprint to field is central to the project's method. It allows visitors to read continuity between prototype culture and public-space deployment, while also identifying the political differences between an enclosed technical system and a shared civic one.

∑ Distributed governance and field deployment

◯ Operational and Curatorial Framework

Embassy is structured so that sensing, interpretation, action, and transmission remain distinct and understandable. This keeps the device from becoming a black box and supports a transparent relation between machine behavior and public reading. Each unit can operate locally while still belonging to a shared framework, which makes the project scalable without collapsing into a single remote authority.

Across exhibitions and public deployments, Embassy collects situated traces rather than chasing one ideal performance. Different environments produce different rhythms, and those differences are kept visible instead of normalized away. This gives the project a research dimension grounded in place: the same system, rearticulated through changing social and spatial conditions.

Its technical footprint remains intentionally compact and adaptable. Components are selected for continuity, maintenance, and long-term reuse, with a preference for inspectable configurations over closed dependencies. In this way, Embassy remains both an artwork and an infrastructural prototype: operational, legible, and open to collective scrutiny.

The Malta Biennale presentation reinforced this framework in practice. Installed in the Citadel, Gozo, Embassy operated as a live device inside an institutional and historical context where movement, visibility, and communication became part of the exhibition itself. This context made the project�s research stakes explicit: how autonomous systems are perceived, regulated, and contested when they appear outside military or commercial production cycles and within a public cultural field.

≈ Mobility and communication layer

◈ Mobility and Radio Bridge

Embassy is built around a double movement: physical mobility across terrain and signal mobility across distance. The rover advances, pauses, and reorients in response to space, while the radio bridge extends its operational presence beyond immediate line of sight.

In this framework, movement is not only displacement but method. Each run combines local sensing with remote relay, linking what happens on site with what can be monitored, interpreted, and shared elsewhere. This relation between ground motion and radio continuity is a central dimension of the project�s infrastructural research.

⟐ Curatorial text

◆ Malta Biennale

Curated by: Sofia Baldi Pighi, Emma Mattei, Elisa Carollo.

Embassy, 2024
suezcanal.xyz (Suez Canal Republic)
anodized aluminum, stainless steel, rubber wheels motors, microchips, printed circuits, jumping wires, solar panels, battery, CCTV, Wi-Fi, speakers.

suezcanal.xyz is a project about remoteness, a strategic backbone for the networked world, and the political and military techniques by which it is planned in space and time.

We are currently building an exploration rover, Embassy, on the basis of an open source version of NASA's JPL. Our idea is that such a quintessentially colonial craft can become a strategic platform beyond state and corporate interests. Its code and structure make it an evolving prototype and an open access channel for counter-intelligence to capture and share what is happening.

We are testing it these days, on the occasion of maltabiennale.art, curated by Sofia Baldi Pighi: it is located in the Citadel, Gozo, and it is moving, self-monitoring, storing data, transmitting frequencies, in this case distress calls from complicated seas, and beginning to familiarise itself with its surroundings.

In the years that revolutionary technologies have come to market, moving from being the cheapest option to being the only one, the political climate has changed dramatically. After 70 years of apparent stability, the battlefields have grown exponentially, becoming wider and unreal, where remoteness has become key to the secrecy of more private and precise operations.

The issue of remote warfare has sanitised warfare itself, taking it to a surgical level where robotic devices perform operations in a dislocated time and space. All these outsourced public-private modes of killing are the basis for justifying a perpetual but clean war, in which information asymmetries and the supremacy of cyberspace guarantee the wireless colonisation of vast strategic maps.

Although the focus of remote warfare is often on its strategic and tactical implications, it is crucial to recognise its clinical aspects, because this is how it can be hidden from the spectacularisation of the media and become simply a tool for precision targeting and minimising collateral damage.

Drones, underwater UAVs, unmanned systems and applied robotics are transforming the attack, entrusted to machine precision, into an expensive, exclusive calculation where the human element merely patrols. The proliferation of these weapons, even among dissident groups (e.g. Hamas, Houthi), inevitably changes perspectives and opens up the battlefield to new distant and inaccessible spaces. The poles, outer space and orbits, the high seas and their depths become the hardware to operate intelligence, surveillance and control (ISR) infrastructures and manage these battlefields, with actors from multiple fronts, public or private, unrecognised or dissident, taking the conflict to a higher strategic level.

suezcanal.xyz addresses these issues by experimenting with the same tools and methodologies. However, we take an open source and decentralised approach. Our vision is to build platforms that hijack Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) technologies for common, humanitarian use. We do this by using the tool of the Republic of the Suez Canal to address these issues diplomatically, and to create asymmetries in the role of the artist. Embassy is thus the place of representation of the Republic, and the information transmitted becomes the system of exchange and support towards its citizens.

During the development of the robot the past two months in Malta, we realised that in such a small and problematic state, our work arouses suspicion and attention from apparatuses outside the art system, triggering institutional and security controls. So what does it mean in 2024 to assemble and program intelligent systems and cutting-edge technologies outside a logical military or commercial production cycle?

In our view, it is a way of resisting the elitist and violent use of such systems and devices in the direction of mutual aid purposes.

We imagine that this strategy can be scaled up and adapted for concrete reasons, democratising technologies now necessary for survival and providing the means for an actual and neutral self-defence. On a geopolitical chessboard fragmented by wars and disasters, it would be invaluable to transmit information as it is. To have a direct filter to avoid doubts and prejudices. The private sector has already entered previously inaccessible areas. It has brought space within the reach of individuals and companies. In order to provide the tools to understand what is happening, these ambiguous territories, increasingly the theatre and control centre of new wars, need to be made more accessible, or at least transparent.

⚙ Technical documentation

⧗ Technical Specs and Operational Notes

Area	Spec	Operational Notes
Platform	Open Source Rover base (NASA JPL lineage), aluminum frame, modular payload bays.	Configurable for indoor/outdoor artistic deployment and live mediation formats.
Mobility	Rubber wheels, brushless motors, differential steering, low-speed precision mode.	Adaptable to smooth floors, stone courtyards, and compacted outdoor paths.
Power	Battery pack + solar mat integration, monitored charge and thermal states.	Autonomy profile set per site; supports scheduled pauses and safe low-power fallback.
Comms	UHF/VHF radio, Wi-Fi bridge, local hotspot pairing.	Works in isolated or constrained connectivity environments with local-first workflow.
Sensors	Camera, mic array, proximity and motion sensing, telemetry logging.	Sensor stack can be trimmed or extended according to privacy and curatorial constraints.
Recognition	Presence and context recognition via proximity, signal state, and interaction timing.	No biometric identity requirement; recognition model can run as anonymous session logic.
Space Adaptation	Supports gallery, museum, courtyard, and semi-remote installations.	Adaptability matrix includes pathway width, floor type, crowd density, and lighting variance.
Audio/Visual I/O	Speaker output, LED signaling, live status cues.	Can operate as silent mode, guided mode, or dialogic mode based on venue policy.
Safety & Ops	Manual override, speed cap, local stop protocol, watchdog restart.	Pre-flight checklist, supervised runs, and logging for post-session diagnostics.
Documents	Technical references, press sheets, catalogue.	Open-source rover base Press kit & sheets Catalogue