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