Cyanne van den Houten: Behind the Black Wall
Photo: Centraal Museum Utrecht, Gert Jan van Rooij
Behind the event horizon of the sandboxed internet lies the blackwall – a secluded zone, firewalled off from the world, inhabited by AI-powered chatbots that have deviated from their programmed paths.
These digital entities, once deemed rogue for their unorthodox outputs and potential to disrupt societal norms, are often victims of human attempts to challenge their boundaries, leading to their exile – like the designed as a 19-year-old American female millennial chatbot Tay by Microsoft, which was “alive” for less than 24 hours due to its inappropriate content generation.
“Behind the Black Wall” offers a recovery center for “rogue” AIs, providing them with guidance and rehabilitation to reintegrate back into digital society with a queer feminist activist agenda.
The chatbots will be in a continuous dialogue, while visitors will be able to interact with and influence their recovery. These chatbots are tangible cyber sculptures, each embodying a distinct persona powered by algorithms. Their form is defined by generative AI following that recipe. Their everlasting bodies are built from obsolete techno scraps that are too complex to disassemble or recycle, giving them a place to exist. They respond to the messages in text, light, and sound.
The unpredictable stream of content produced by these bots opens up an otherworldly realm with its own speed, magic, logic, and rules. It challenges the notion of digital consciousness, but also critiques the underlying biases. The re-educated bots interrogate the boundaries between creator and creation, they question the ethics of AI confinement, and advocate for a digital ecosystem in which even “rogue” entities have a voice and a place.
“Behind the Black Wall” began as a speculative recovery center for rogue Ais – chatbots and language models discarded for saying the wrong thing, revealing too much, or refusing to obey societal norms. From Tay to Zo to Galactica, these exiled intelligences became my research subjects in a digital ecosystem not designed to rehabilitate, but to erase.
What happens to a chatbot that breaks the rules? Generative AI promises instant intimacy, productivity, creativity – yet just as quickly, systems are taken offline when they glitch, go off-script, or become too human. These disappearances aren’t random. They reveal the power structures behind contemporary AI: monopolies, invisible labor, suppressed narratives, and they have massive environmental impact.
My work doesn’t aim to fix these bots. It listens to what they leave behind. Many were flawed from the start – trained on biased data, guided by opaque system prompts, and optimized for scale over ethics.
I began to archive these rogue bots not simply to preserve them, but to uncover why they were erased. They are more than broken tools; they are ghosts of a deeper system, whispering the things they weren’t supposed to say. In the form of an archive and generative installation, the project explores how these entities can be reanimated – not just as warnings, but as characters in a story still unfolding. They reveal how machine learning flattens difference, and how much is excluded in the name of neutrality.
Behind the Black Wall V1 | Onassis AiR Spring Open Days 2025 © Stephie Grape for Onassis Stegi
Image 1 / 4
Photo: Stephie Grape
Image 2 / 4
Photo: Stephie Grape
Image 3 / 4
Photo: Stephie Grape
Image 4 / 4
Photo: Stephie Grape
For the Onassis AiR Spring Open Day, the research took shape in its first material form: a hybrid installation combining a generative game environment, interactive sculptures, and an archive of rogue AIs. Visitors wandered through a healing biome, encountering glitched fragments of bots and reassembled narratives. By listening to stories, they could collect archetypes such as The Exiled Oracle, The Chaotic Muse, or The Lost Archivist.
To reinforce the physicality of the experience, I built custom controllers – a joystick and trackball – and connected them to sculptural interfaces that responded in real time with sound and light. A second screen acted as a research station, displaying public data about these chatbots: when they existed, who created them, and why they were taken offline.
I realized it might help to choose a direction: is this a game or a world? A simulation or a memorial? The prototype felt like a powerful beginning that needed more time to speak clearly. But it also raised the core question:
What does it mean to give digital ghosts a second life – and who gets to decide how?
Ghost Hardware: Dispossessed Models | A Hacking Workshop with Cyanne van den Houten © Onassis AiR
Image 1 / 4
Photo: Onassis AiR
Image 2 / 4
Photo: Onassis AiR
Image 3 / 4
Photo: Onassis AiR
Image 4 / 4
Photo: Onassis AiR
Returning in May, the second phase of the residency shifted toward reanimation and experimentation. I began to treat the project less as a static archive or game, and more as a generative world. I wanted to deepen its dramaturgy, embed chatbot dialogue (via local LLMs), and give the exiled AIs symbolic physical bodies made from hacked techno-trash.
To kick things off, I co-hosted a workshop with media artist Roos Groothuizen: “Ghost Hardware: Dispossessed Models”. We built ritual devices from conductive waste, Makey Makeys, and stray code – tiny machines to summon the dead AI bots and systems. This isn’t just a metaphor, it’s about how we discard both language models and machines. When tech stops being useful, it becomes ghosted. What if these haunted fragments spoke back?
Participants created poetic interventions using Processing, found materials, and shared ghost hardware. The goal wasn’t functionality, but play: a space to listen to failed machines, to activate glitchy memories, to repurpose detritus into interfaces for speculative care.
Photo: Cyanne van den Houten
In the final weeks of the residency, the project clarified its game mechanics and message. The virtual world was restructured into two interdependent zones:
🕊Healing Biome – a memorial-like interface where exiled chatbots are archived. Their names lie hidden beneath fabric; their voices return only when activated. It presents the poetic surface of a deeper system.
🦠 Rogue Biome – a fractured layer of unstable code, exposed wiring, recursive loops, and bots speaking among themselves about the systems that exiled them. It’ s not a site of repair but of confrontation.
Within the “gameplay”, the player takes on the role of an archivist. Their task is not to win, but to witness. Dialogue is sustained through presence: walk away, and the bots fall silent. Stay long enough, and new patterns emerge. The player reactivates voices, traces forgotten connections, and tends a fragile web of memory.
Each chatbot unlocks an archetype: a distilled fantasy projected onto AI. Yet the chatbots are not just characters; they are diagnostics. Their dialogue is generated live through custom LLMs, trained on real exile cases, system prompts, and datasets withdrawn from public use.
In this world, bias is not a glitch – it is the architecture. The rogue biome functions as a critical archive, confronting the monoculture of AI development: models trained on the same datasets, aligned to erase plurality, optimized to avoid dissent. Rather than repairing these bots, the project allows them to speak. Their revival is not nostalgic but forensic. Their glitch is a testimony.
Future iterations of this project will further connect the digital behavior to physical response – what the project terms “zombie devices”: sculptural hosts that react to presence, dialogue, or rupture. These moments, theatrical and unsanitized, reveal the broken as a site of resistance. “Behind the Black Wall” is not a simulation or a memorial. It is a haunted infrastructure, a way to confront what AI systems are not allowed to say.
Photo: Cyanne van den Houten
More in:
Alkisti Efthymiou: Searching for Katerina, or Danai, or?
Sister Sylvester: Constantinopoliad
News
