As a portrayal of a problem, that of human intelligence within the framework of a senseless robotic being, micro.flow addresses how our brains deal with information and the perception of it. It both unfolds the problem of the motorsensory system and how it is able to create a relation or a graphic symbol.

Despite its limited output - to pump two liquids that do not mix, and knowing nothing about its own configuration - micro.flow is able to watch its own action through a camera, its eye, and to learn from it. In this way, it will eventually come to understand its own body and behavior.

A machine, a tube arranged in a accidental, nonsystematic way, a camera and a computer brain define micro.flow's components. The machine has a task: to successively inject a colorless and a colored liquid, which do not intersect or mix, into the transparent tube. Thus the process starts, and as the liquids are pumped into the hose, a sequence of colorless and colored sections develop in a totally random, unpredictable way. At the beginning, the system knows nothing about its own body; it can only perform the assigned task and, through a camera, its eye, survey the process.

The video camera motion-tracks the flow, so the machine should be able to build up knowledge of where and how the fluids travel down the tube. As it assigns values to each individual action it has taken, the machine should build a comprehension of the process itself in terms of abstract data. It tries to imagine patterns that should be written in the matrix of the tube and it tries to write these patterns by injecting liquids in a conscious order. Once it is able to recognize its own imagined pattern in the tube, it will use this pattern as a character.

This abstract character is then sent to a second, identically constructed system. Only, the arrangement of the hose is different, though likewise in an absolutely random way. This twin system also tries to convert the transferred information into the same image, but it may be that the matrices of both have hardly anything in common. Obviously, reproduction, negotiation or communication is only possible when there is some common ground. In this communication/negotiation process, both machines can only agree or communicate on basis of a common matrix or territory.