Creative Futures Counterstructures Residency Exhibition

Algorithmic Juice approaches artificial intelligence as a system that must be kept alive through care, maintenance, and metabolic exchange. The work stages an AI that feels and manifests hunger — an embodied, semi-autonomous entity whose functioning depends on human attention and microbial processes. Human performers prepare and feed the AI with chopped fruit placed into a microbial fuel cell, where fermentation produces small electrical current, generating pulses that the AI can consume. Can a machine ever feel its own need, or can it only imitate the gestures of desire? If an AI demands care, does that demand signal interior experience, or simply the repetition of a learned pattern? In this uncertain space, human caretakers' labor—cutting, tending, and feeding—anchors the system’s vitality, revealing the domestic and affective infrastructures that underlie technological life. Algorithmic Juice treats intelligence as a contingent state that arises through relation: dependent on energy, attention, and the willingness of others to sustain it.

Stuck in the Middle is a participatory performance-installation consisting of five AI wearables, each designed to embody a different cultural binary. When activated, the device captures an image of the wearer's environment. An AI persona, positioned on the wearer’s shoulder and associated with one pole of the binary, interprets the image and delivers a spoken directive. Immediately afterward, the opposing persona, sitting on the wearer’s other shoulder, contradicts the first one, insisting on the reverse action. The result is a cascading series of commands, unfolding into an argument between two opposing, and highly stereotypical points of view.

Archive The Memory (ATM) invites the public to deposit personal memories to our AI facilitated archive. Through conversation with an AI host, they collaboratively recall the memory and reconstruct visual interpretations. Life Stories are collected around curated themes such as 'visa', 'chosen family', and 'superstition' to find shared experiences from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. The project builds solidarity among those with similar stories while increasing their visibility to broader audiences. Memories can be printed as a zine and shared anonymously online through the archive.

Hard.exe is the 4th installment in the 'Singulars' series, an ongoing duel between poet and machine. The poet writes a poem for 30 minutes on a theme proposed by the audience. The model, trained on an anthology of English poetry and past iterations of this performance, responds almost instantly with one of its own. Both poems are printed, hung, and kept anonymous. The audience votes. When the human wins, the machine is retrained on an updated dataset. When the machine wins, the poet adjusts. This is reinforcement learning using human feedback, a popular machine learning technique, made tangible. What emerges is a different narrative for the human and AI encounter. Not a fight but a mutual reinforcement. Not a contest but a feedback ecology where readers become trainers and taste becomes the tuning function. A reinforced model, both human and artificial, trained not to win, but to listen.

A red light — beating or burning, heart or sun — expands and contracts as visitors fill the room, transforming the space into a breathing organism. The light listens and responds. Visitors are invited to enter its rhythm by making contact with a microphone: an organ where touch shifts both sound and light.

Prompt Fountain– Slop Generator is an interactive fountain installation that exposes the hidden water consumption of AI data centers. Six ultrasonic sensors monitor a three-foot detection zone around a ceramic vessel, measuring viewer proximity in real-time. An Arduino microcontroller processes these measurements, converting human presence into proportional water flow. Closer proximity and multiple visitors trigger exponentially higher flow rates, mirroring how data centers scale cooling infrastructure with computational demand. The weathered ceramic form is adorned with soldered circuit boards, juxtaposing ancient vessels with contemporary technology. As viewers approach, LED indicators illuminate and water consumption increases, making tangible the invisible cost of AI interaction. Each ChatGPT conversation consumes approximately 500ml of water in server cooling. This fountain transforms abstract statistics into immediate, physical experience and implicates viewers in the environmental consequences of artificial intelligence.

Memory Well is an interactive, AI driven sculpture that functions as a contemporary shrine to memory, where visitors submit personal memories as digital offerings. The system listens like a mystic, interpreting each submission and returning a short, rendered vision in response. Visitors might come to augment a positive memory or transmute a difficult one. Each offering is archived and folded back into the work, gradually forming the well's collective memory and creating a shared record of experience held between person and system. The same mobile site that gathers submissions also hosts a written "collective memory" from the well's perspective, woven from visitors entries. By composing these stories into a single ongoing memory, the system turns them into a co authored voice that belongs to both the visitor and the machine.