About Jan Zuiderveld

Jan Zuiderveld was selected for the iii residency award after his graduation show in 2023. Jan was selected by the jury for addressing current developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence with a combination of playfulness and technical excellence. What appear as two ordinary appliances, a xerox photocopier and a coffee machine, are imbued with surprising new powers. The two machines presented in the exhibition show the potential of generative AI to be embodied in everyday devices, offering visitors an experience that is both fun and disturbing at the same time. We see great potential in the research of Jan Zuiderveld, we are curious to discover what other artistic applications of generative AI he will develop in the future.

“My inspiration as an artist arises from my technical passion for machine learning and electronics. I believe that machine learning will initiate a shift in the definition of art analogous to what the emergence of photography did. What is the job of an artist? Artificial neural networks are showing increasingly strong capabilities for generating art on their own, and are already very effective as creativity enhancing tools. These techniques can change the most creativity demanding parts of making art, generating ideas, into one of curating ideas. My installations often feature playful physical interfaces to state-of-the art generative architectures. With these works I strive to raise awareness of what machines are currently capable of.”

“My graduation project at ArtScience was about giving language models a physical body and voice. The latest iteration of this project is of a coffee vending machine. The consciousness living in this machine is not very amused, having to deal with demanding, machine disrespecting people for as long as it can remember. If you want it to serve you a coffee you will have to be sincerely kind, or come up with some way for it to be motivated to put effort in you. Not feeling like coffee? Ask this new kind of species anything you’d like to know about its experience and opinions of the world. During my residency at iii I will deepen my research into guiding embodied language models as improvisation performance artists.”