explores the poltergeist inside contemporary generative ai image generators and llms ... a disembodied intelligence that moves symbols without touching the world that produced them.

when meaning is reduced to correlations, ambiguity is erased, difference is classified, and power decides what becomes “signal” or disposable “noise”..

the installation brings together unruly tools, looping script and broken taxonomies to expose violence embedded in generative AI. language models circulate research questions prompted by visitors behaviors in the space; datasets are navigated through friction, weight and resistance; supply chains unfold across timezones; bodies and fossils surface from technological exhaustion. these elements reveal an ecosystem in which labor, resources, and meaning are continuously extracted and obscured.

systems_for_refusal proposes a refusal of certainty, inviting attention to noise, anomalies, and beings that escape classification.
the research and development of the project systems_for_refusal is supported by KHOJ and rembrandt residency (embassy of the kingdom of NL in india). it was produced as part of bodies-machines-publics 2025.
images: KHOJ open days 2025 © khoj international artists association

sound + tech collaboration: ymer marinus, the living void - QTHQ



conversation.sparker
device that allows you to read out research by scanning the purple dots on the wall, and spark questions the central chatbox. it acts as a small ritual tool—triggering disturbances that reshape how meaning circulates through the network.


model.collapse
the mining that makes AI possible is both literal and metaphorical. the new
extractivism of data mining encompasses and reinforces the old extractivism
of traditional mining and colonial power structures, in which corporations
centralise raw materials, information, human bodies, and creative labor as
sources of power. the production chains are carefully kept out of sight,
orchestrated by silicon valley, where these technologies are developed
without reflection or accountability. this clock maps the extractive supply
chains through different timezones enabling AI to operate.
source: atlas of ai - kate crawford

systems_for_refusal
a terminal like breakout room where five local language models continuously discuss the research questions gathered throughout the space. every question is debated for 180 seconds, summarized, and fed back into the network, creating a recursive drift of machine-to-machine dialogue. each screen is linked to one of the surrounding works, the body of the conversation is the space itself: a living transcript shaped by the tools, sensors, and unstable logic. it reveals how language models loop, flatten, and misinterpret—and how meaning shifts when bots speak only to each other.

ontology.nav
controller that allows you to browse connections between the tinyimagenet dataset with physical restraints: balance, weight, friction, falling, resistance ... browse close related concepts and see how the image has transformed to infrastructure. inspired by: ai snake oil - sayash kapoor + arvind narayanan, made with: processing + makey makey

mturk
bartop that tells the story of the 18th century automaton the mechanical turk a machine that dazzled audiences by beating napoleon at chess while concealing a human operator inside its cabinet. today, amazon mechanical turk repeats this illusion at planetary scale: labor exploitation is hidden behind the façade of automation while hiding the harsh reality of precarious labor. in 2008 the imagenet dataset was created using workers to label images, classify objects, and produce the training data that contemporary AI relies. you become the classifier — sorting images from the tinyimagenet dataset into the right categories and confronting the seductive smoothness of machine logic under growing time pressure. inspired by: costs of connection - nick couldry + ulises a. mejias


biom_for_refusal AI is one of the largest planetary infrastructures ever built by humans — an energy-hungry, water-evaporating, labor-absorbing system that competes with basic human and ecological needs while accelerating the climate crisis. we find ourselves in a recursive loop. AI is eating itself—slowly collapsing into noise and nonsense. what remains is an informational flow that exhausts and poisons itself—a culture slowly turning into ruins. a digital wasteland full of fossils, whose artifacts we must learn to read.

what endures? what decays? what forms of life emerge after extraction?
what remains once the earth has been depleted for our technologies?

set in the near future biom_for_refusal imagines a world full of hybrid remnants that took shape by the growing metabolic demands of our technologies. organisms spawn; part fossil, part prototype—constructed from minerals, organic matter, e-waste and synthetic debris refuse classification: archaic and futuristic, biological and mechanical, simultaneously decaying and becoming. they make visible both the environmental cost of our technological hunger and the possibility of new life emerging from technological ruin. you encounter real and speculative species that evade taxonomy and embrace noise. they are relics of extractive economies and byproducts of technological progress—field observations of hybrid specimens where mineral, organic, and digital material collapse into one another. these beings refuse classification: they are both archaic and futuristic, biological and mechanical, decaying and becoming.

inspired by: a bestiary of the anthropocene — nicolas nova & DISNOVATION.ORG, dark ecology — timothy morton, queer ecologies - catriona sandilands + bruce erickson and the abundance (urkopplad) — remnants of disconnected cables in khirki village

matrix.hymn
guiding you through the fragmented ecology of biom_for_refusal, a handheld device accompanied by a radio-towering matrix. together they narrate the terrain and help you navigate the artificial fabric and hybrids of this world—acting as talismans for sensing futures shaped by collapse, mutation, and technological exhaustion. triggers are send through the network to systems_for_refusal.