ROAMING BOARDER LANDS
❶ Mind
❷ Birds Eye
umarts focus
research 2025
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