Ai, Ai, Ai

Brainrot characters

We are constantly bombarded with AI-generated nonsense—Shrimp Jesus, muscular oranges (“U Din Din Din Dun”), monkeys inside bananas (“Chimpanzini Bananini”)—parading across our feeds. These surreal figures, often dismissed as mere AI slop, exist to grab attention, yet their rise in the form of Brainrot characters shows something more complex at play. Brainrot isn’t just a symptom of attention decay; it has become a collaborative language, a way of coping with the overwhelming pace and surreal logic of digital life.

Still, when we let generative AI do too much of the talking, it tends to produce sameness and mediocrity. To push beyond that and to create something unexpected, strange, and alive, we need to resist settling for the first result. Real creativity with AI requires engagement, friction, and play.

Recipes for working with AI

In The Poetics of Prompting exhibition, curated by The Hmm in collaboration with MU Hybrid Art House during Dutch Design Week 2024, we showcased artists working with AI in precisely this way. They used AI not just as a generator, but as a material to be pushed, questioned, and shaped.

A year later, The Hmm is back at MU with a more hands-on approach. We’ve invited some of the artists from the exhibition and a few new faces to share their recipes for working with AI. Make your way through a landscape of brainrot characters to work on developing a meaningful relationship with AI tools at a number of physical play stations. Or join us during one of our lunch sessions for a BYOL (Bring Your Own Lunch) AI experiment. Participants of the lunch sessions get a free copy of the ai, ai, ai publication, filled with 20 assignments aimed at students and creative professionals.
The schedule for the BYOL sessions follows soon!