Cyanne van den Houten: Behind the Black Wall

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, which was “alive” for less than 24 hours due to its inappropriate content generation.

“Behind the Black Wall” offers a recovery center for “rogue” AIs, providing them with guidance and rehabilitation to reintegrate back into digital society with a queer feminist activist agenda.

The chatbots will be in a continuous dialogue, while visitors will be able to interact with and influence their recovery. These chatbots are tangible cyber sculptures, each embodying a distinct persona powered by algorithms. Their form is defined by generative AI following that recipe. Their everlasting bodies are built from obsolete techno scraps that are too complex to disassemble or 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 up 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 re-educated bots interrogate the boundaries between creator and creation, they question the ethics of AI confinement, and advocate for a digital ecosystem in which even “rogue” entities have a voice and a place.