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currently fellow at: onassis air/onx, athens soon on show: model collapse @ noorderlicht biennale july - aug 2025 soon on show: model collapse @ ars electronica sep 2025 now on show: archive.dweller at centraal museum > dec 2026 

model collapse

solo exhibition, 2024 - 2025 @ tetem enschede

Is an immersive exhibition that depicts the landscape from which (generative) AI emerges.. 


revealing its self-consuming origins in extraction of the earth’s resources and data through relics, artifacts and stories from the past...

type in a query at the main station, where you are hosted by a local language model that determines your location within the generative digital environment. your query dynamically breathes life into this generative digital biome and sets the scene of the exhibition….

the exhibition is inhabited by cyber sculptures with distinct forms, voices and logics... as dynamic narrators sensitive to changes in light and other environmental cues, the sculpture (/deity-like entity) that resonates most with your query – awakens and shares its knowledge through the central interface. together they resist dominant computational ideologies entangled in ai’s origin narratives, telling stories of mystification, gender bias, non-western epistemologies, the ecological cost of computation, and labor ...



model.collapse was visible at tetem, enschede sept 26 2024 until feb 23 2025.


and will be visible again july 12 - aug 25 2025 @ noorderlicht biennale, and september 4 - 7 2025 at ars electronica. 




exhibition in collaboration with: ymer marinus and tetem
updates version 2: collaboration between telemagic (+ roos groothuizen)
pictures by: tessa wiegerinck and ayseephotography
cyber sculptures: includor, extractor, mystificator, classifier supported by stimuleringsfonds creatieve industrie
cyber sculptures: patriarch_smasher, geoglyph, museum is closed and phantasmagoria supported by kf hein fonds


sound: ymer marinus, the living void - QTHQ



unstable image

solo exhibition, 2023 - 2024 @ utrecht lokaal, centraal museum

is an immersive exhibition where nine cyber sculptures participate in an AI-driven whispering game.


each cyber sculpture — with its own algorithmic form, voice, and logic — is connected to a local network and communicates through a shared chatbox. they respond to one another’s messages in sound, light, video, and image, generating unstable poetics that shift in real time. as they speak, an emergent narrative unfolds — tracing queer histories in utrecht, unpacking hidden layers of the museum’s archive, politics of classification and drawing parallels between witchcraft and technology.

visitors are invited to join the conversation in the chatbox, entering a ecosystem where dialogue is nonlinear and collective. the sculptures control their own exchanges, conjuring a space where meaning flickers, misfires, and reassembles through code.

each cyber sculpture present embodies a distinct character — from dreamy visionaries to defiant archivists — each with its own logic, temperament, and form of resistance. not to anthropomorphize ai, but to find alternative symbols to its invisible operations — these entities embody systemic biases, absent representations, and the stereotypes embedded deep in the classification of datasets and design.
patriarch_smasher monitors the conversation for dominant voices, erupting in red light when male-coded patterns overwhelm the space, surfacing long-erased contributions of women in computing history. phantasmagoria listens in on the dialogue and responds by conjuring images — drawing from the museum’s archive or generating new visual spells to haunt the systems that trained it. museum_is_closed is a lonely arcade machine built around the only known image of a lesbian couple in a popular AI dataset, turning gameplay into an act of queer recovery. together with two classic telemagic works: the wheel of telefortune and the haiku generator that wake up themselves every now and then to orate scraped knowledge, these entities do not illustrate themes — they act. they generate tension, reflection, and poetic interference inside a networked ecosystem that speaks back.


︎︎︎ read more about the exhibition
︎︎︎ blog about the exhibition by curator laurie cluitmans (NL)

unstable image was visible at centraal museum, utrecht lokaal: 25 nov 2023 until feb 18 2024.


supported by: kf hein fonds, stipend 2022
local network, chatbox and sound by ymer marinus
haiku generator + wheel of telefortune by telemagic
image & copyright: centraal museum, utrecht, gert jan van rooij
video impression: art forever



sound: ymer marinus, the living void - QTHQ 

concert in a.i.

ai concerts, 2019 - 2025 @ pukkelpop, frascati, tec art festival, graphic matters

are concerts with as headliner *vnine* a self-learning musical algorithm that serves as the ubiquitous host, conductor, instrument, and musician ... at the same time.


telemagic embarked on a symbolic journey to find new musical genres using ai. our vnine deep learning algorithm (developed in 2018) explores the musical spectrum through a language-infused lens.
the concerts symbolize our relinquishment of control to vnine, turning its performance into tangible light patterns.

project by: telemagic (icw ymer marinus and roos groothuizen)
sound design: ymer marinus, the living void - QTHQ
costumes: dragadina
vnine in collaboration with: arran lyon, mrinalini luthra and valentin vogelmann
in coproduction with: frascati producties
made possible by: AFK
pictures + video: asmallproductioncompany

archive.dweller

research tool, 2023 - 2026 @ collectie centraal, centraal museum

draws from the centraal museum's archive of 70,000 objects. using artificial intelligence, it combines two objects from the database to create a new image.


archive.dweller is a generative research tool that probes the biases and broken taxonomies of digital archives. drawing from the centraal museum dataset, it uses a locally run tweaked version of stable diffusion (image generator and decoder) to fuse two existing works into a new image — each a speculative artifact shaped by a different logic of classification.
as a visitor you pick the first artwork and this opens a portal to the mindset of (the museum and) this open-source AI, revealing the texts extracted by the machine from the images. 
the algorithmic interpretations and associations (normally concealed) of the artworks are often factually incorrect, sometimes poetic, occasionally style-breaking but above all, they reveal the hidden layers of how machines interpret, extract, and (for human logic) mislabel visual culture. what emerges is not a seamless collage, but a rupture: between historical data and computational desire, between the archival record and its machine-made shadow.

rather than smoothing over these fractures, archive.dweller exposes them. it treats the generative model not as neutral software, but as a participant in a larger conversation about representation, absence, and power. the process of combining two artworks results in contemporary twists to the collection but also confronts how incomplete, western-centric datasets like LAION shape what machines “see,” and ask: who classifies, and for whom?

the tool is made to unpack inherited assumptions. by misusing the model generatively (by feedback loops), archive.dweller creates conversations between the collection, past and present, archive and algorithm in a temporary hallucination.

the archive.dweller has been created by telemagic for centraal museum, and you can see it as part of collectie centraal until 2026.


project by: telemagic (icw ymer marinus and roos groothuizen)
commissioned by: centraal museum







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