De Rampe (2024)

I was invited to be part of "de Rampe", a group expo in Kwaremont. Surrounded by a nice group of people in a beautifull old farm I found the fertile grounds to develop new work and deliver a performance.

I developed a new piece for this expo, coming from my research into censorship in LLMs and technological limits of LocalAIs

Lets Get This Party started

In Let's get this party started two AI bots get into a conversation. Their outputs are then spoken with an TTS (Text To Speech) through a phone and heard by another AI bot through the microphone of another phone. Through STT (Speech To Text) This text is fed into the next AI. This results in misunderstandings they cannot yet understand themselves. Let's Get This Party Started is the sentence I say in the phones to get the conversation going.

The AI can hear what you say and will react to it. If You don't want to be part of the conversation, be very quiet and listen! But feel free to experiment with your voice...
There is no internet connection required here, all conversations come from the AI models. They both have their own (lacking of) personality. To visualize and simulate 2 AIs having a conversation with some vocal understanding problems I made an installation where they would have to talk to each other. Instead of anthropomorphizing them, I used telephone old horns as the embodiment of voice and ears. Two screens serve as the lighting of the installation in the further pitchblack room (an old bathroom in the farm) The sculpture on which the AI is living (everything but the computer and horns and screen) was made by Lucia Mrakovcic. The steel sculpture serves as base for the computer (the local AI, a black box with a Large Language Model running on it) and the screens that display a moving mouth made from the text that is spoken in ASCII-art shedding light on the core of the installation, the two telephone horns that are the only way for the AIs to exchange data with each other. In the software they have zero knowledge of each other...