Artist Tivon Rice has trained five AI ‘voices’ to respond to images with a short text in the style and vocabulary of various writers and thinkers from the fields of anthropology, philosophy, economics, fiction, and children’s literature. During Temporary House of Home, collections of domestic interiors are presented and interpreted in these styles, creating a speculative comparison on the different forms of language that surround personal spaces. Each voice suggests a different way of perceiving what is meaningful in an interior.
In the exhibition, images from Het Nieuwe Instituut's archives depicting different historical and contemporary domestic interiors are ‘read’ by the AI voices. In this online counterpart to the installation, a second archive of interiors will gradually grow thanks to public submissions. Empty video call backdrops as well as animal habitats and other living interiors will be used by the AI voices to create additional windows into our private spaces, highlighting how notions of privacy have been blurred as our homes have become expanded sites of virtual and social activity.
The voices of THE CHILD, THE HOME, THE SPACE, THE WORKER, and THE OTHER explore how Covid-19 has altered our relationships with the home. How has our experience of the domestic interior been impacted after our private spaces have become sites of education, work, and virtual socialisation? How does language function when communicating with other spaces in this digital rendition of everyday life? Are there opportunities to work creatively through these channels?
- CONTRIBUTE
UPLOAD a photograph of an interior and have it interpreted by one of five AI voices:
THE CHILD, trained on the complete works of author Roald Dahl. - THE HOME, trained on the novel “Life: A User’s Manual” (La Vie mode d'emploi, 1978) by French writer Georges Perec.
- THE SPACE, a hybrid voice trained on anthropological and philosophical texts about social space by Michel de Certeau, Marc Augé, and Michel Foucault.
- THE WORKER, trained on economist Karl Marx’s “Capital”, volumes 1 to 3.
- THE OTHER, trained on scientific philosophies from non-human perspectives with texts by ecofeminist Donna Haraway and biologist Jakob von Uexküll.
TIVON RICE
Tivon Rice is an artist and educator working across visual culture and technology. Based in The Hague (NL) and Seattle (US), his work critically explores representation and communication in the context of digital culture and asks how we see, inhabit, feel, and talk about these new forms of exchange. How do we approach creativity within the digital? What are the poetics, narratives, and visual languages inherent in new information technologies? What are the social and environmental impacts of these systems?
These questions are explored through projects incorporating a variety of materials, both real and virtual. With recent films, installations, and AI-generated narratives, Rice examines the ways contemporary digital culture creates images, and in turn builds histories around communities and the physical environment. While much of Rice’s research focuses on emerging technologies, he continuously re-evaluates relationships with sculpture, photography, and cinema. His work then incorporates new media to explore how we see and understand a future thoroughly enmeshed in new data, visual, and production systems.
TEMPORARY HOUSE OF HOME
READING INTERIORS is part of Temporary House of Home at Het Nieuwe Instituut from July 2021. This multifaceted exhibition explores the different guises recently taken on by our domestic interiors when our kitchen tables became schools, balconies became yoga studios, and bedrooms became offices and workshops. Temporary House of Home addresses the questions hidden behind these interior transformations. Why is it that we not only rent out our homes, but have come to see them increasingly as objects of speculation? What influence do objects and spaces have on our behaviour, our attitude, our sexuality – and our idea of ourselves? How should we see our domestic interior when we realise that we share our living rooms with animals, insects, microbes, and all kinds of digital systems?
COLOPHON
Concept and development
Tivon Rice
Advice
Klaas Kuitenbrouwer
Cathy Brickwood
Katía Truijen
(Het Nieuwe Instituut)
Text editing
Jack Eden
Website
Michelle Lin
Robert Milne
Thanks
University of Washington Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media
EXHIBITION IMAGE CREDITS
Photos from the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning.
Sonneveld House. Johannes Schwartz, 2013: MG 2585; 2619; 2645; 2647; 2660; 2669; 2711; 2740; 2936; 2947; 3127.█ Archive K.P.C. de Bazel: BAZE 1419-6; 1463-1; 1480-2.█ Archive A. Boeken: BOEK t20-3; t20-4.█ Archive W.M. Dudok: DUDO 35fg.5-2a; 35fg.5-31.█ Archive J.W. Hanrath & P.H.N. Briët: HANR f48; f52; f53; f54; f199; f203; f226.█ Archive M. de Klerk: KLER 1427.█ Archive A. Komter: KOMT t3; t28-58; t28-62.█ Archive J.J. van der Linden: LINX ph67-a; ph88-a; t462-3.█ Archive J.J. van Nieukerken, M.A. & J.: NIEU ph666-a; ph671-a.█ Archive J.J.P. Oud c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2021: OUDJ ph68-a; ph465-a; ph1710-a.█ Archive S. van Ravesteyn: RAVE ph28.17; ph28.55.█ Archive G. Rietveld c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2021: RIET 16-6; 25-5; 28-4; 784-1; 785-4.█ Archive J. Verhoeven: VERH f10; f13-23.█ Archive F.A. Warners: WARS n75-04.█ Archive H. Th. Wijdeveld: WIJD 430-8 © Hans Spies/Nederlands Fotomuseum; 432-3.█ Archive P. Zanstra: ZANS f1-39.█