Autobahn is a highway of simulated vehicles operating autonomously. With no predetermined choreography or scripted events, the work generates its own behavior through programmed rules — driving personalities, agent interactions, physics — suspending narrative in favor of emergent dynamics: a space shaped by automated decisions and reciprocal interferences.
Each vehicle carries its own speed, mass, and driving characteristics. Four personality types — cautious, moderate, aggressive, and drunk — determine how each agent moves through the system and how it affects those around it. Accidents are not programmed; they are outcomes of the same rules that produce smooth traffic. Order and breakdown are not opposites but related states of the same system.
Each car, acquired by participants, enters the environment as a temporary agent, a brief passage within circulation. Nikita Diakur treats simulation as method rather than representation: he designs the conditions under which a system can fail, congest, or flow, where accident becomes structure and observation replaces composition.
In the exhibition space, a Fiat Multipla sculpted in Diakur’s signature style generates a physical counterpoint to the screen. The car’s horn is connected to the simulation: pressing it makes vehicles inside the highway honk, and drops new cars from the sky, accelerating congestion and altering the system’s rhythm in real time.
Autobahn is commissioned by SOLO Collection and presented at SOLO CSV, Madrid.
