ROAMING BOARDER LANDS
❶ Mind
❷ Birds Eye
umarts focus
research 2025
THOUGHTS
Automatons: Symbolic Machines Through Time
23 july 2025
Automatons are self-operating machines—designed to move, respond, or perform tasks without direct human control. But beyond their mechanics, they have always served as mirrors of their time: expressing cultural values, technological imagination, and social hierarchies. From ancient water clocks to 18th-century mechanical tricksters, these devices blurred the line between the magical and the mechanical. Today, automatons have evolved into algorithms, AI systems, and digital labor tools—still performing, still concealing, and still revealing the deeper structures that shape our world.
If al-Jazari’s automata symbolized spiritual cleanliness and cosmic order, what do today’s machines symbolize? Convenience? Control? Invisible exploitation? Could we reimagine them as instruments of care, ritual, or resistance instead?
Machine Tricksters and Spectacles to Hide Workers
The Digesting Duck (Canard Digérateur) built by Jacques de Vaucanson was the size of a living duck and was covered in perforated gold-plated copper to allow a view of the inside workings. It moved like a duck, wiggling its beak in the water, quacking, and most famously though, it could eat pellets offered to it, and then poop them. De Vaucanson claimed that duck contained a small “chemical laboratory” capable of breaking down the wheat grain. In the 19th century, it was found that Vaucanson had faked the mechanism, and the Duck’s poop consisted of pre-prepared breadcrumb pellets, dyed green.
At the end of the 18th century, the Mechanical Turk a chess computer beats none other than Napoleon, and causes a sensation.. but the machine is fake, a chess player is hidden in a cubbyhole under the chess board. Magnets attached to the bottom of the pieces help him to follow the game.. He controls the doll that moves the pieces with levers.
It is proof that people in the 18th century already believed that machines could match or even surpass human intelligence. over time, many machines have been tested with games. First, an AI was on human-level as soon as it could beat the smartest human at chess... this shows that AI is not becoming a human, but a tool to show us what it means to be human.
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk) is a prime example of labor exploitation in this age. Mturk commodifies human labor by treating workers as mere data points in a vast algorithmic system, promising workers flexibility, while hiding the harsh reality of precarious labor.
Just as the original turk concealed a human operator to create the illusion of a machine's capabilities…. Amazon is making human effort invisible, promoting the idea of a fully automated economy. Workers on Mturk often complete small tasks for minimal pay… devaluing human effort. Tasks that require significant cognitive labor can pay as little as a few cents.. in contrast to the profits generated by Amazon.
Contemporary practices
This is a reimagining of the narrative of ‘Huma’, a powerful Middle Eastern jinn or genie. Often depicted as a female, horned three-headed spirit, Huma is thought to be responsible for causing a fever. Allahyari rewrites the narrative, envisioning Huma using her heat-related powers as means of moderating the planet’s temperature, countering the effects of global warming. This video and 3D printed sculpture form part of a wider body of work by the artist that reinterprets monstrous female figures of Islamic mythical origin. Allahyari is interested in “re-figuring”, a form of feminist practice whereby artists reclaim the past to re-imagine different forms of present and future. In this work and others, she counters Western-centric perspectives on present challenges such as climate change.
Sources
https://aljazaribook.com/en/2019/07/30/the-basin-of-the-peacock_en/
https://archive.org/details/cover_20200113_2057/page/n103/mode/2up
Costs of connection - Nick Couldry + Ulises A. Mejias
Ideas
1. Red, glossy, devilish bloated forms — represent the most influential figures in contemporary big tech. Male-coded and corporate, they grip each other tightly by their ties, eyes glowing red with embedded LED lights. Steam escapes from their nostrils as their interlocked grasp intensifies. Forming a closed circle, they enclose the solitary ‘user’—at the center—who is being classified, optimized, reduced, and monetized. The collective posture evokes the familiar scene of a child being cornered in a schoolyard: an act of domination masquerading as order. The figures are unmistakable: Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella—CEOs whose platforms and decisions shape our digital life. Once dubbed “social media,” these platforms now operate as extractive content infrastructures. Together, these individuals oversee vast systems of AI deployment, automation, data labor, content moderation, platform governance, and algorithmic surveillance. Their symbolic entanglement illustrates both competitive aggression and systemic complicity—a self-sustaining loop of techno-capitalist power. As public figures, they must be held accountable—not only for the technologies they unleash, but for the structural conditions they continue to reinforce.
METHODS
Design as Diagram of the System
07 january 2025
“The diagram of the piece is the physical scenario of how the piece unfolds...”
It’s about a balance of creating a set of parameters around a situation that allows for an exciting amount of chance, but not so much that it’s out of bounds. - MSHR
Growing archive of Event Scores
Promptology & Recipes: Sound
Ingredients: voice, pack of cards, telephone book, nature, time
Mapping
Diagram for a new work
1) Low tech enhancing spatial experience
2) High tech digital interaction
3) Instruments that guide visitor
Writing algorithms that dictate how shapes, colors, and patterns evolve over time. By manipulating parameters, achieving dynamic and intricate visuals. Combining elements of randomness with structured design, allowing for unique outputs each time the code runs.
Tools for the ritual: Platform for Human Body Interfaces - MSHR
Instruments
Noiseboxes
Possible outcomes of condensed highly curated momentum
Automated Drawings
Strategies
No-prompting
Biases in AI
Learning Bias
History of seeing AI development as purely accidental
Numerical value brings possibilities to calculate distances, correlations, relations and probabilities. Backbone of image generation models. Tokenize text and image.
Feedback strategies
Text 2 Image AI as sophisticated noise generators, they do not generate images. Xray images, medical field is where they stem from.. CLIP and Diffusion models.
Misuse is good use
Openjourney | Are we entering a purple future?
UMAP Mapping Embedding Space
THOUGHTS
NPC’s conspiring the form of the world
10 march 2024
Roblox integrates previously non-verbal characters from its games with GPT-3 technology, transforming them into conversational NPCs. Suddenly, characters that players used to simply walk by without a second thought are now engaging in deep, meaningful conversations. Each NPC is equipped with a backstory, a purpose, and a context within their world. Before long, players find themselves immersed in conversations with these characters for extended periods.
While the vision of NPCs with AI sophisticated enough to dynamically plot storylines without human input remains aspirational within the current state of video game technology, there have been significant strides toward more interactive and engaging NPC behavior.
Examples where games have utilized AI to enhance NPC interaction and contribute towards the game's storyline or world-building:
1. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Radiant AI
Skyrim's Radiant AI system allows NPCs to make their own decisions based on their needs and the world around them. For example, NPCs can react to theft or violence, engage in conversations with each other, and perform tasks related to their roles in the world.2. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor/War - Nemesis System
The Nemesis System is a standout example of NPCs with unique personalities and relationships that evolve based on player actions. Orc leaders can remember encounters with the player, bear grudges, rise in rank, or even become terrified of the player based on past defeats.3. The Sims Series
While not a traditional narrative-driven game, The Sims series showcases AI-driven NPCs (Sims) that engage with each other based on a wide range of needs, desires, and relationships. Sims form friendships, rivalries, and families, pursue careers, and react to the changing environment around them, creating emergent stories driven by their interactions.4. Facade
Facade was an interactive drama and one of the first games to attempt real-time AI storytelling. The game places the player in the role of a friend visiting a couple who are going through a difficult time in their marriage. The player's interactions with the couple influence the direction and outcome of the story. The game's AI interprets the player's typed responses to dynamically steer the narrative.5. Red Dead Redemption 2
Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2 features an expansive world with NPCs that live their lives according to schedules and react to both the player's actions and the world around them.6. Alien: Isolation - The Alien AI
Alien: Isolation features a highly sophisticated AI for the alien that hunts the player. It uses a two-tiered AI system: one for directing the alien towards the player in a general sense (to ensure it's always a threat) and another for its moment-to-moment decisions (like investigating noises or sightings). This AI creates intense, unpredictable encounters.CONCEPT
Seeding Venus
9 march 2024
Seeding Venus: Cyberflesh Monster
"Seeding Venus: Cyberflesh Monster" is a sculptural installation that merges the ancient with the contemporary to explore the evolving standards of femininity and beauty defined by generated AI cyberflesh monsters.The core of this project is a meticulously crafted upscaled 3D-printed replica of the iconic Venus of Willendorf, a symbol of fertility and womanhood that dates back to approximately 28,000-25,000 BCE. This ancient figure, renowned for its voluptuous form and exaggerated features, serves as a starting point to look through time and societal change. It represents an era when fertility was perhaps the paramount value attributed to femininity, a stark contrast to the multifaceted ways in which womanhood is understood and celebrated today.
Embedded within this modern recreation of the Venus figure is a small screen. This screen dynamically displays an ever-changing array of images: unique reinterpretation of the Venus figure generated by advanced AI algorithms based on donated bodyparts. These generative images are seeded with scanned body data, reflecting current perceptions, standards, and interpretations of femininity and beauty that are limited to the training data. Inviting viewers to witness an infinite procession of Venuses, each adaptation informed by modern cultural and societal inputs. The work shows the evolution from such singular representations, in current times playing with the still singular representations in datasets.
"Seeding Venus" is a dialogue between the viewer, the past and the present, a commentary on the permanence and plasticity of beauty standards. While the original Venus of Willendorf embodies a petrified image of womanhood, set in stone for millennia, the generative AI component underscores the fluidity and subjectivity of these standards as they morph through time. This contrast is a reminder that some ideals may seem as enduring as stone, our collective perceptions are continually being reshaped and redefined.
The conglomerate bodies created from the information donated in the installation give a reflection of the current state.
It challenges to consider the impact of technology on art and culture, and to engage with the ever-evolving narrative of what it means to embody femininity in cyberspace.
Test generations seeding Venus
Inspiration work: "Cyberflesh Girlmonster" (1995) a CD-ROM by Linda Dement
Donated body parts collected during Artists’ Week of the Adelaide Festival 1994 have been used to construct a computer based interactive work. About 30 women participated in the original event by scanning their chosen flesh and digitally recording a sentence or sound.
Conglomerate bodies were created from the information donated. These have been animated and made interactive. When a viewer clicks on one of these monsters, the words attached to that body part could be heard or seen, another monster may appear, a digital video could play, a story or medical information about the physical state described by the story, may be displayed. The user moves relatively blindly between these. There is no menu system or clear controllable interface.
The work is a macabre, comic representation of monstrous femininity from a feminist perspective that encompasses revenge, desire and violence.
http://www.lindadement.com/cyberflesh-girlmonster.htm
THOUGHTS
Seeding
9 march 2024
Exploration
"Petrified" refers specifically to a natural process of fossilization, where organic material is replaced by minerals over a long period, retaining the detailed structure of the original material.
Looking at sculptures as "petrified images" is a metaphorical act, suggesting that the sculpture captures or freezes a moment, idea, or entity in a permanent form, similar to how petrification preserves organic material.
This usage is poetic and not literal, as the creation of a sculpture involves intentional artistic and technical processes, whereas petrification is a natural, geological process.
In contrast Generative AI, such as GANs, can iterate indefinitely, generating endless variations on this sculpture. This iterative process could even be driven by the algorithm's ability to learn from each generation, adapting and creating new outputs based on the feedback loop between the generator and the discriminator within the GAN framework. This results in a dynamic, ever-evolving exploration of a ‘petrified image’.
Inspiration work: The Dangers of Petrification
The Dangers of Petrification is an artwork by Jimmie Durham in the form of a museum vitrine. It is not really what it seems to be—more like a form of counter-subversive doubling.
The vitrine holds a collection of stones that have likely met the gaze of the artist upon his wanderings, just like the bicycle parts that jumped at Picasso from the garbage heap to suggest a bull’s head.Richard Hill describes what is going on here as double mimesis: “stones representing petrified objects, which are themselves the stone representations of organic objects.”
The handwritten labels next to the stones are also an imperfect mimesis of authoritative museum classification. The handwriting identifies the maker of this museum vitrine as an outsider, who does not know the sources and protocols from which the proper modern authority is derived. These labels describe the objects as petrified versions of, variously, an apple slice, a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese, a slice of bacon or, a cloud. With the exception of the petrified cloud, they are presented ready-to-eat, perhaps as offerings to the appetites of hungry gazes in search of likenesses, or the desire of half-gods to eat from the fruit of immortality. The tension is all between the hard and the soft, organic tissue and death.
Is petrification the fate that awaits us if we follow our appetites? Wherein does the danger reside? There is incorporation in petrification, which is a process of a slow and gradual replacement of organic tissue with minerals. As Richard Hill underlines, “a petrified object is a copy in which the original cannot, by definition, survive the process of reproduction.”
The stone that is described as a petrified cloud sits on a larger piece of paper with a handwritten description, which speaks of the extraordinary circumstances that lead to the sudden petrification of the cloud at the ocean’s surface, at the horizon, where heaven and earth meet. Is the cloud not the most transient and etheric of matter, an essentially metamorphic condition, quite the opposite of stones that are permanent, immobile, and insensate? This object and its identification as petrified cloud is incredible, unbelievable; it demands a suspension of disbelief.
Jimmie Durham’s vitrine speaks of what we believe stones to be, speaks of their use in architecture and in museums, their claim to permanence and stable knowledge, and restores this knowledge and its objects to the profound uncertainty of knowing—to its abyssal, liminal, and animate character. The metaphors that have become congealed in stones are thrown back unto us: to be frozen with fear and be emotionally hardened. The stones are rebelling against the classifying gaze.
CONCEPT
Behind the Black Wall
3 march 2024
Project selected for Onassis ONX Fellowship 2025
Behind the event horizon of the sandboxed internet lies the blackwall - a secluded zone, firewalled off from the world, inhabited by AI-powered chatbots that have deviated from their programmed paths.
These digital entities, once deemed rogue for their unorthodox outputs and potential to disrupt societal norms, are often victims of human attempts to challenge their boundaries, leading to their exile. Like the designed as a 19-year-old American female millennial chatbot Tay by Microsoft, that was ‘alive’ for less than 24 hours due to its inappropriate content generation.
"Behind the Black Wall” offers a recovery center for ‘rogue’ AI’s, providing them with guidance and rehabilitation to reintegrate with an activist queer feminist agenda to participate in a digital society again.
The bots are in a continuous dialogue within a chatbox, allowing the visitors to interact and influence their recovery. These chatbots are tangible cyber sculptures each embodying a distinct algorithmic powered persona. Their form is defined by generative AI, following that recipe their everlasting bodies are built of obsolete techno scraps that are too complex to disassemble to recycle giving them a place to exist. They respond to the messages in text, light and sound.
The unpredictable stream of content produced by these bots opens an otherworldly realm with its own speed, magic, logic and rules. It challenges the notion of digital consciousness, but also critiques the underlying biases. The relearning bots interrogate the boundaries between creator and creation, they question the ethics of AI confinement and advocate for a digital ecosystem where even the 'rogue' entities have a voice and a place.
- phantasmagoria
- patriarch_smashser
- geoglyph
VISUAL RESEARCH
Scrying for Connection
Scrying for Connection
3 march 2024
Seeding alternative bodies for radio antenna’s and skeumorphic cardboard friends.
AI WORKSHOP TOOLS
Generative AI Tools for Scrying
1 march 2024
GAMES
Can a Neural Network recognize doodling?
Prompt Guessing Game
AI Icebreaker Minigames
IMAGE AI TOOLS
Image to Text (Clip Interrogator Stable Diffusion)
Text to Image (Stable Diffusion Fast)
Text to Image (Stable Diffusion 2.1)
Text to Image (DALL-E Mini)
Text to 6 Images (Select Your Own Models)
Text and Image to Image
Image to Image I
Image to Image 2
Image Recognition
Smart Image Recognition (Answers questions)
Instruction Based Image Editing 1
Instruction Based Image Editing 2
Background Remover
Image to 3d Model
Add depth to image
Faceswap
Styletransfer from one image to another
Neural Styletransfer
AnimeGan
Image in 3D space
Photo Colorization
Upscale and Resizer
Image Variation
DeepDream
Pixelation of Image
PROMPT ENGINEERING
Stable Diffusion artist prompt encyclopedia
Prompt Optimizer for Stable Diffusion
For inspiration: The Aesthetics Wiki
VIDEO AI TOOLS
Check out function in Runway ML
Text to Animation
Text to Video
Image to Video 1
Image to Video II
Video Faceswap
Transcribe
Youtube Video to Text
SOUND AI TOOLS
Text to Speech (a lot of different models)
Text to Speech (clone your voice from an audio file)
Text to Music, Artwork and Lyrics
Image to Music
Image to Sound Effect
Multitrack Midi Data Generator
Song Cover Generator
WEB DESIGN TOOLS
Screenshot to HTML
TEXT
Chatbot LLama
Mixtral Text Assistence
Chat with a PDF file
EXTRA
AI x Design Community
Search engine to see if your work is in AI datasets
Our Fave AI Podcast by Holly Herndon
Reflection on Generative fill in Photoshop:
Text: Rethinking Design Tools in the Age of Machine Learning
Lecture Video by Benjamin Bratton on Design, Philosophy and A.I.
Text: Design in the Era of the Algorithm
Text: Can AI be used for Artistic Research?