NOX

2023

immersive installation with video game, audio, videos, scenography, duration variable

Guanyin is a carebot, the program in charge of treatments at NOX. She told me I’ve been enrolled in a charity subscription service for runaway cars like me. Problem cars who need retraining in Nonhuman Excellence.

— ENIGMA-76, 3 APRIL 20XX

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Located in an unspecified smart city in the near future, NOX, short for “Nonhuman Excellence,” is a facility where Farsight Corporation trains and treats their range of sentient self-driving cars. To suit their customers’ various needs and tastes, they’ve developed four families of vehicles, each with a different personality type and role: a sanguine car for joy riding, a melancholic delivery vehicle, a phlegmatic executive car and a choleric patroller. Their relatively high degree of subjective agency has demanded that Farsight also develop a complementary system for monitoring their performance and well-being. When their cars demonstrate undesirable behaviour, this system summons them to NOX to undergo a five-day rehabilitation scheme overseen by Guanyin, a carebot built into Farsight’s software. The centre offers a holistic approach to body and mind, with treatments ranging from basic to luxury packages based on a set budget of NoxCoin. These may either be provided by a customer directly, or a sponsor partaking in NOX’s charity service. Throughout the programme, Guanyin and the cars maintain open communication with patrons, charting progress as they work through sources of trauma and malfunction in the hopes of restoring “excellence.”