Two experimental performances on technology-generated content that escapes control.
The Vienna-based duo Ursula Winterauer and Claudia Larcher explore AI hallucinations, where algorithms fabricate fictions and overwrite analog artifacts, transforming them into new audiovisual archives.
Iranian artist Ali Phi uses an AI-driven robotic arm to address wasted data—digital residues, including those left after death. The project will be presented in Poland for the first time, following its premiere at Beyond Basel in Miami.
AI: Waste & Hallucinations
Decompositions for Computers | Ali Phi
A generative audiovisual performance featuring both a human and an AI-driven robotic arm, exploring the hidden environmental impact of digital waste (wasted data). Drawing on global datasets — including World Bank statistics, population growth, internet usage, and the digital traces left by the deceased — the artist transforms them into immersive audiovisual landscapes, visualizing how our online presence accumulates and reshapes ecosystems. Across five chapters — Formation, Creation, Connection; Human Factor / Parallel Universe; Non-human Activity; Pandemic + Blockchain; Dead-to-Alive Ratio — the work turns data into evolving particle systems, light structures, and soundscapes, reflecting on how innovation transforms both the natural and digital worlds.
The AI-driven robotic arm plays a key role: observing the projections and responding to the datasets of each chapter, it collaborates with the artist by generating sounds and influencing visual parameters. Acting simultaneously as performer and mediator, it co-creates the piece, blurring the boundary between human and machine agency. After its world premiere at Beyond Basel in Miami and MUTEK Mexico City, the performance will be presented in Poland for the first time at the Patchlab Festival.
The project was realized with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto.
Hallucinations | Claudia Larcher, Ursula Winterauer
Ursula Winterauer, together with Claudia Larcher, takes AI hallucinations as a starting point — the phenomenon in which algorithms misinterpret data or generate fictions. Relics of analog media — VHS noise, television glitches, and interlacing — are revived as audiovisual archives and overwritten by AI, gaining a new context. The project examines memory technologies and their aesthetic evolution, from an analog past to a digital future, creating an immersive environment where image and sound intertwine, questioning how technology shapes perception, space, and memory.