Flatware, Hardware, Software, Wetware

An Interactive Installation Exploring AI, Perception, and Institutional Truth
Exhibited as part of (A)I Tell You, You Tell Me at ZKM | Center for Art and Media
Developed in collaboration with Alistair Hudson, Bernd Lintermann, Dan Wilcox and Tina Lorenz,.

Flatware, Hardware, Software, Wetware is an interactive media installation that questions the authority of interpretation in art. As museums and cultural institutions increasingly adopt algorithmic tools to describe and organize their collections, this work confronts a central question: Who owns the truth when artificial intelligence becomes the voice of meaning?

Concept

A selection of original artworks from the ZKM collection hang on the walls, each accompanied by a small Raspberry Pi-powered screen. Instead of fixed museum labels, these screens display AI-generated interpretations ,uniquely generated for each visitor.

Here’s how it works:

• Visitors receive an RFID tag and go to an interaction station, where they answer a series of philosophical, aesthetic, and emotional questions. Based on these inputs, the system assigns one of 16 conceptual themes, such as satire, shakesperean English, emojis, or love letters.
• Behind the scenes, an AI vision model analyzes each artwork and produces a description that aligns with the selected theme : transforming the institutional voice into something personal and often unreliable.
• Every visitor receives a unique exhibition experience. The same artwork may be interpreted one way as a symbol of ecological collapse, and another as a product of digital alienation—depending on the viewer’s input. All interpretations are technically sound, yet philosophically absurd, reflecting on the mutability of narrative in the age of AI.

Technical Write-Up

AI System and Development by Yasha Jain

Computer Vision & Generative Models:

Custom-trained vision models to interpret and extract semantic features from artworks. The text generted from each artwork was then used by a locally trained AI to generate a text descripton of the artwork for one of 16 themes.

The AI-generated text output system was developed by fine-tuned language models on ollama, and hosted locally on the Hertzlab AI server.

Realtime Experience:

All content is generated live based on user presence and interaction

Each session is ephemeral, reinforcing the idea that interpretation is never fixed and truth is always contextual

Context

Flatware, Hardware, Software, Wetware explores the consequences of turning interpretive power over to machines—particularly in institutions trusted as custodians of cultural knowledge.

By having a machine mediate meaning, the installation reveals how truth can be personalized, distorted, and re-authored by algorithmic systems that reflect our own inputs and assumptions back to us. At its core, it poses the provocative question:

What happens when institutions, the supposed bearers of truth, rely on artificial intelligence to speak for them?

The work turns viewers into co-authors of meaning, inviting them to interrogate the very systems that shape their understanding of culture, art, and information.