Ai, Ai, Ai: Slopject & Squishies

Make Your own Slopject

Do you ever stop to think about how everything you do online is being tracked? Every like, scroll and second you spend watching a video says something about you. All these small pieces of information together are called data. Algorithms use this data to try to predict what you like, so they can show you more of the same kind of content and advertising. Convenient, perhaps, but is it always fair?

In the Make Your Own Slopject workshop, you step into the role of an algorithm yourself. In exchange for handing over some of your own data, you receive a token that lets you draw (or ‘buy’) someone else’s data profile from a capsule machine. What does this person watch? What music do they listen to? What do they search for online? Next, you design or sculpt with clay, a collectible figurine that you are almost certain the person behind the data profile would want to buy.

Squish the System: from facts to vibes

For a long time, the rule was: if there’s a photo of it, it must have happened. We now live in an age where any photo could just as easily have been created by AI. Every day, we are flooded with photos, videos and memes that are not necessarily meant to tell us something, but to make us feel something: curious, restless, in love with a product. Just enough to keep us watching, clicking or buying.
And it’s not just people watching. Algorithms squish the world around us into categories they can understand.
Images, then, increasingly refer less to something and instead want something from us. A squishy is the perfect object for exploring this. It isn’t made just to be looked at, but to be used: to be held, squeezed and made hard to put down. Just like the images surrounding us.
In this workshop, you are not a consumer of images, but a producer. You design your own paper squishy with a mission: an object that doesn’t say anything, but triggers a particular sensation. How do you make it go viral? What kind of aesthetic will work, and for which audience? And what should it look like to achieve that?

About the Hmm

The Hmm is a platform for internet cultures. We explore and celebrate the creativity that emerges from virtual interactions and our relationship with the technologies that make them possible. Through accessible events, research, exhibitions and educational programmes, we offer curious audiences playful and engaging insights into online life.
The workshops Make Your Own Slopject and Squish the System: From Facts to Vibes were developed in collaboration with artist Maria Mombers, who is also one of The Hmm’s workshop facilitators.
This project was made possible in part by the City of Amsterdam as part young Netizens program (https://www.amsterdam.nl/innovatie/jongeren/youngnetizens/) and Cultuurfonds.