model.collapse is an immersive exhibition that depicts the landscape from which (generative) AI emerges..

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 september 26, 2024 until february 23, 2025. And will be visible again july 12 - august 25, 2025 @ Noorderlicht Biënnale, and september 4 - 7, 2025 at Ars Electronica.

Model Collapse is in collaboration + made possible by: TETEM
Cyber sculptures made possible by: Tetem, K.F. Hein Fonds and Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie

Concept: Cyanne van den Houten + Ymer Marinus
Interface Mainstation: Ymer Marinus + Cyanne van den Houten
Interactive cyber sculptures, research text + images, 3D environment and models, AI system prompt tweaking, installation design, microcontroller + sensor coding: Cyanne van den Houten
Spatial sound, interactive spots, experience design and realisation of connection between: landscape + custom local AI system + interface, main codes: Ymer Marinus
Interface redesign: Roos Groothuizen