image: still from generative game environment behind the black wall
Khoj BODIES-MACHINES-PUBLICS 2025
Motivation
My practice moves between sculpture, code, and participatory systems to explore how machine logics shape power, politics and bodies. I’m driven by the desire to understand and subvert the algorithmic infrastructures that mediate intimacy, truth, and belonging—especially as they intersect with gender and queerness. My past projects have engaged with rogue AI systems, feminist technologies, and failed machines as speculative tools for resistance and reimagination.
Bodies–Machines–Publics resonates a lot with my practice and I am drawn to the critical lens and the playfulness in experimental + transdisciplinary formats.
I hope this residency offers me a (crucial) space to slow down, reflect, and reconfigure my work beyond Western-centric frameworks. The invitation to think with others—across geographies and bodies—feels needed in my practice now.
My expectation for the Khoj residency is to engage in conversations about algorithmic violence, and alternate techno-spiritualities; to listen, prototype, and share the methods (i have developed over the years) and learn from others. I see the residency as a moment to ask questions not easily answered within disciplinary or institutional borders.
I bring to Khoj an open-ended methodology rooted in both research and play: building devices that don’t behave, scripts that loop in error, rituals made from scrap code. I hope to contribute a critical but generous sensibility, shaped by earlier works like Seeding Venus, patriarch_smasher, Museum Is Closed, and Behind the Black Wall.
Khoj feels like the right place to develop the next step! Thanks for considering me. (I'm a Dutch media-artist - but the dutch form already closed last month, and just found out this week about the call)
image: archive.dweller, installation/research station made before that uses the museum collection of Centraal Museum and AI to decode img2text and combines two images from the collection to one new one
Artistic proposal
For the Khoj residency, I propose to develop an open-ended, generative environment called Systems for Refusal (working title) that explores the violence and absurdity of classification systems within AI. Inspired by Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI, particularly her analysis of how AI systems render the world visible through extractive logics, I want to investigate how classification becomes a mechanism of control—how it fractures bodies, assigns roles, and limits agency (mostly by human labour).
This project will take the form of an evolving game-like environment that combines hybrid sculptures, participatory rituals, and moments of immersive improvisation. These fragments may manifest as interactive interfaces, speculative devices, reanimated datasets, or scenographies that glitch and resist categorization. Visitors might be asked to sort, touch, whisper, or play.
I am interested in building an unstable world where classification is exposed as arbitrary, biased, and fragile—where even the act of sorting becomes a site of friction and possibility. Rather than simulate a coherent system, I aim to create a haunted anti-system—generative, but leaky. This space may be inhabited by AI-generated agents, broken taxonomies, or hybrid “creatures” assembled from machine scrap and folklore.
This builds on threads from my past projects:
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Seeding Venus speculated on reclaiming of categorization by feminist practice
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patriarch_smasher re-engineered algorithmic tools into ritual devices for exorcising digital patriarchy
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Museum Is Closed is a game that explores how AI systems get trained by creating a decaying archive of obsolete hardware as memory system
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Behind the Black Wall explored rogue AI entities exiled from normative platforms
As part of the residency, I would also like to host a “Ghost Hardware” workshop—a collective space for sharing DIY tools, reimagining how AI systems might be built otherwise. Participants would bring their own haunted devices, failed prompts, or speculative sensors, and we would prototype new configurations together. This could become a site for cross-geographic exchange—melding feminist code practices, local forms of resistance, and speculative fiction.
The final form of the work may remain intentionally unresolved: a system that refuses to classify, a machine that forgets, a sculpture that breaks its own rules. My approach will be driven by what emerges through dialogue with other artists, the local context, and the public. Khoj’s situated and approach to art-making feels like the ideal ground for such a process.
This project is not about finishing a product, but about inviting alternate imaginaries where bodies, machines, and publics might relate otherwise.
image: museum is closed
Extended introduction to my practice
My name is Cyanne van den Houten (they/them), a media artist based in Utrecht and Rotterdam. As a maker I am guided by the similarities between technology and magic and focus on the control and power it has over humans. My practice consists of creating controlled environments where computers and codes decide. Since 2019, I have developed sculptural, interactive installations and AI-based environments that expose how technological systems operate — often unpredictably — revealing their inner mechanisms and embedded politics.
I approach my work as a queer maker and hacker: reappropriating systems, embracing the glitch, and reclaiming control through play, ritual, and critical experimentation. My mission is to make the invisible aspects of contemporary media tangible. I do this through tinkering, cyber craft, and creating immersive environments powered by custom electronics, responsive systems, and DIY interfaces.
images: model collapse, installation that depicts the landscape from which (generative) ai emerges, revealing its self-consuming origins in extraction of the earth’s resources and data
Sharing knowledge and tools through my practice is at the core. This feels necessary because the public debate around artificial intelligence is so far removed from the technological reality. I believe we need to take these technologies apart, and reassemble them, to see alternative futures.
My visual and conceptual language combines symbols, data forces, relics of the free internet, (techno)animism, gamification, queerness, Fluxus, and pop culture. The outcome is always playful, critical, immersive and sensory — not just using technology, but revealing its conditions and consequences by actually using it.
In 2022, I chose to prioritize my solo art practice in order to develop new energy and technological skills. This was rewarded with receiving the K.F. Hein Fonds Stipend in 2022, which culminated in my first institutional solo exhibition at the Centraal Museum: Unstable Image (2023-2024), in which 9 cybersculptures engage in a algorithmically powered whispering game exploring queer history and politics of classification. After this show I developed the solo exhibition Model Collapse (2024-2025) at Tetem Enschede, in which the ecosystem of generative artificial intelligence are made tangible by visualizing extractive hidden costs in a generative game environment. My proposal for Khoj builds directly upon this research.
images: cybersculpture chatbots - phantasmagoria, patriarch_smasher and geoglyph (see portfolio)
Since 2023, I have been developing cyber sculptures — responsive, intelligent agents made through hybrid methods: from 3D design and coding to circuit-bending and computer-controlled woodcuts. These entities are part of larger ecosystems: generative environments (Model Collapse), local chatbox networks (Unstable Image), or light-based dialogues.
I intend to expand this method during the residency, working with salvaged electronics from Delhi to build new cyber sculptures. I received a contribution from the Stimuleringsfonds in 2024 to deepen these cyber crafts with hacking methods like feedback loops within existing AI system, during the residency i intend to evolve these methods even further that will result in new cyber sculptures.
My approach reflects my collective media practice Telemagic. As founder of the collective (in 2018) I collaborate with Ymer Marinus and Roos Groothuizen and other makers and we develop art interventions and tools that demystify technology. In recent years we have toured with Concert in A.I., a self-learning algorithmic band (2019) and done international exchanges (in Macao) with the 1 Euro Cinema, a cinematic oracle/film archive (2019 - 2023). A milestone for our collective is that in 2023 we developed the archive. dweller on behalf of the Centraal Museum which combines art out of their archive to generate new works and is part of the permanent collection from 2022 to 2026.
images: prototypes for ghost hardware dispossesed models
We’ve since grown into .zip, an artist-run media lab in Rotterdam, where we host public programs on digital culture and organize Ghost Hardware — a recurring hackathon/tool jam focused on rogue AI, e-waste, and experimental storytelling. I co-run this event with Roos Groothuizen and Louisa Teichmann.
Sharing tools and knowledge has become a central part of my practice. In 2024–2025, I took part in three residencies focused on tangible AI. At HKU (Utrecht), I worked on making AI tools locally accessible through workshops and public programming. Here I now also teach interaction and hacking methods together with Ymer Marinus one semester a year.
In early 2025 I joined the Art + AI research group at UmArts (Umeå, Sweden) of Umeå University for a month, where I deepened my research into feedback loops and organized a Ghost Hardware event focussed on AI tools and creative collaboration methods. This September, I’ll return to teach hacking methods in their MA program. I’m currently a fellow at Onassis Air + ONX (Athens), developing an interactive archive of rogue chatbots and have recently organized a trash-hacking workshop with zombie devices.
These experiences have shaped my current direction: combining artistic research, digital poetics, and communal toolmaking. The opportunity to join Khoj would allow me to take this further in a context that resonates deeply with my interests.
I’ve previously visited India (2023), Guwahati - Sikkim and New Delhi an experience that left a lasting impression. Returning now to work within this liminal, shifting environment would be powerful and timely.
This website is the first step in what I hope will be a meaningful exchange.
Thank you for reading and considering my application.