Mirror, Mirror on the Wall?

Marina Orlova, Why Robots Need Therapy, 2024, lecture performance

Could AI be neurodiverse? What if it requires care and mental health support? In her lecture performance, Marina Orlova invites the audience to consider how mental health is defined in an era of big data and automated care. Why Robots Need Therapy gives an AI patient and a human therapist the stage. The performance includes a presentation of the mentally.unstable.ai app, a demonstration of a live therapy session with the AI patient, and an open focus group session.

Marina Orlova (b. 1987) is an independent dance/theatre maker based in Amsterdam. Having a background in Sociology and Cultural Studies, Marina studied experimental choreography at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. Marina combines her background in sociology with a curiosity for machine learning, choreographic methods, and her own experiences within marginalized communities. She uses technology as an absurdist mirror for societal issues. In 2024, Marina founded the EIAI.Institute and presented its research at various conferences and universities across Europe.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Alexiety, 2018, soundtrack

Intelligent Personal Assistants such as Alexa, Google Home and Siri form the core of the smart home ecosystem. They operate, monitor and control smart home appliances while keeping their operating algorithms secret. What kind of relationship are we forming with these IPA devices? !Mediengruppe Bitnik is here to research, honour and dismantle them. In a set of three songs made in collaboration with French musician Low Jack, the duo attempts to capture the feelings we develop towards these systems. These range from carefree love and alienation to anxiety and discomfort. They take the audience from a time before surveillance issues and massive privacy violations to a current constant state of 'Alexiety'.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik is a Berlin-based artist duo founded by Domagoj Smoljo and Carmen Weisskopf. They work both on the internet and with it as a medium. Through their work, the artists raise topical questions about data realities, surveillance, non-human entities and networking, among other issues.

Jonathan Reus,  Bla Blavatar vs. Jaap Blonk, 2024, performance

Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk is a collaboration between Jonathan Chaim Reus and Jaap Blonk that brings the vocal labor behind AI voice models to the stage. In live performances, Blonk engages in a vocal battle with his AI-generated voice clone: the Bla Blavatar, performed by Reus. In each performance, Blonk carefully performs ‘Dataset Poems’ as his voice is recorded live, with each recording contributing to a training dataset intended for future public use and improving Bla Blavatar.

Jonathan Chaim Reus is an experimental musician, artistic researcher, and creative technologist. With a background in composition, mathematics, and computer science, he approaches technology as a playground, with the stage as a sonic laboratory for technological imaginaries. His recent work focuses on creating datasets as a form of musical play and exploring the voice in the 21st century.

Jaap Blonk (b. 1953) is an avant-garde composer and performance artist. As a sound poet, he forges a unique connection between the modernist and Dadaist movements of the early 20th century and the present day.

Douglas Davis Studies in Myself II, 1973, video

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” In his video work, Douglas Davis seems to embody this quote by American professor of communication John Culkin. Davis sits at his computer, typing his thoughts directly onto the keyboard. His stream of consciousness is made visible on the screen, like a technological version of an automatic writing exercise. But who is talking here – Davis or his computer? Does interacting with a device change the way we think and express ourselves?

Douglas Davis (1933 – 2014) played an active role in contemporary art across five decades as an artist, theorist, critic, teacher, and writer, Douglas Davis. He was a pioneer of video in the 1970s, making "live" satellite performance/video pieces were seminal exercises in the use of interactive technology as a medium for art and communications.

Mariska de Groot and Dieter Vandoren, Shadow Puppet?, 2013 – ongoing, performance

In Shadow Puppet?, the human and the machine come together. Two performers — one behind machines and one in the spotlight — play a light-to-sound instrument, creating a dynamic tension of attraction and repulsion. This gives rise to an engulfing play of light, shadow and raw optical sound, and it is never quite clear who is conducting whom.

Dieter Vandoren (1981) develops audiovisual instruments that place the body at the center and explores the intensity of a live musical instrument. His works take on immersive, almost architectural forms, creating physical experiences in the audience that are as powerful as those he feels himself as the performer.

Mariska de Groot (1982) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the history and magic of optical sound. Her interactive installations with self-built instruments immerse audiences in an almost cinematic experience of light and sound. She draws inspiration from historical inventions that seem simple but are not, reinterpreting them to give these inventions new meaning.

Cihad Caner, Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster, 2019, video

This two-channel video installation by Cihad Caner features computer-generated monsters that speak and sing to each other. Caner created the piece in response to the consistent portrayal of those deemed 'other' as 'monstrous' in the mainstream media. If not a creation that we do not fully understand, who is this 'beastly other'? Caner created these performing monsters by digitally recording the movements and expressions of actors, including himself. Hiding beneath the layers of computer-generated imagery are ‘real’ people. Through the lens of technology, Demonst(e)rating the Untamable Monster makes us look into the mirror.

Cihad Caner (b. 1990) questions mainstream image-making methods and the dialogues they generate for (and around) socio-political subjects. His practice explores the politics of the image through the media of video, photography, music, motion capture, and CGI. His fictional characters are often multilingual protagonists in nonlinear, metaphorical narratives that employ humour, absurdity, and poetry to critique the status quo.

Jorrit Paaijmans, homo signans, 2025, installation

What happens when you outsource drawing to a robotic machine that you have built from scratch? In homo signans, Jorrit Paaijmans builds a technological machine to create a paradoxical experience: a machine that demonstrates the human and crafty endeavour involved in making technological devices, whilst also being an entity that ‘lives’ and ‘acts’ independently of human input. The installation consists of three robotic drawing entities, one of which is on display at Korzo. They receive no input to inform their drawings; they only receive a line of code and their own drawings to learn from.

Jorrit Paaijmans (b. 1979) works at the intersection of craftsmanship and technology. His artistic practice is an ongoing experimental exploration of the drawing discipline, and takes a multitude of manifestations including drawings, kinetic installations and performances. Paaijmans' research projects offer new perspectives on the physical relationship between people, work and automation in today's technological society.