Still Processing at Amsterdam’s NXT Museum blurs the lines between human perception and machine logic. Through immersive installations, it explores how data becomes meaning, emotion, and memory in an age shaped by artificial intelligence.
At the intersection of cognition and computation, the exhibition Still Processing offers a sensory excavation of how meaning is formed. Curated with a sharp eye by Bogomir Doringer and on view at the NXT Museum in Amsterdam, the show navigates the boundaries between human emotion and machine logic. The phrase “still processing”– commonly seen as a loading symbol or a mental state of pause – becomes, in this context, a conceptual pivot: an active space of transition where information, feeling, and visual stimuli are digested, distorted, and slowly assembled into comprehension. The exhibition probes two major questions: how does technology shape and manipulate our visual environments, and how do we, as humans, emotionally process immersive media in return? What emerges is not a binary but a dialogue – between code and flesh, pattern and intuition, algorithm and ambiguity.
PROCESSING MEANING: BETWEEN EMOTION AND ALGORITHM
The first rooms set the stage for this dialogue with striking audiovisual intensity. Balfua’s The Slollaleia introduces the “Slollas,” fantastical AI-generated beings whose shapeshifting bodies and sound-based communication challenge the viewer to reconsider the boundaries between synthetic and organic life. Living in the ever-mutating realm of Sayssiworld, these creatures embody what it means to be in constant flux—not just aesthetically, but ontologically. Through a blend of CGI, artificial intelligence, and analog instrumentation, Balfua creates a world where evolution is algorithmic, yet surprisingly emotional. Next, in Duration, Boris Acket manipulates perception itself. A meticulously structured light and sound grid transforms Einstein and Bergson’s philosophical debate on time into an immersive experience where temporal linearity dissolves. Instead of clocks or timelines, Acket gives us echoes and loops—time as feeling, time as rhythm. Here, the visitor’s body becomes part of the circuitry, participating in a kind of ambient clockwork where affect replaces precision.
COSMIC RITUALS AND CHAOTIC JAZZ
The works that follow continue this exploration of sensory reorientation, shifting from the cerebral to the cosmic and back again. All-Together-Now by Children of the Light finds its inspiration in one of science’s most iconic digital visualizations – the 2019 image of a black hole. Five luminous rings orbit the room, their movements slow and deliberate, occasionally aligning in fleeting, almost sacred synchronicity. The installation isn’t just a meditation on gravity or optics; it becomes a ceremony of perception, asking what it means to witness something too vast, too abstract, to truly grasp. This sense of existential play expands further in Jeffrey Lillemon’s Simulation in Blue, where the glitch becomes a character and AI musicians descend into joyous disarray. Channeling the spirit of 1980s holography and the decadence of underground club culture, Lillemon crafts a chaotic and seductive performance of “Cinderella jazz” – a genre that doesn’t exist but feels instantly familiar. The installation pulses with self-aware absurdity, a reminder that in the age of machine creativity, even the artificial can feel oddly sincere.
CRITICAL MEMORY AND THE POLITICS OF PROCESSING
The final rooms are perhaps the most critical – and most urgent. They bring viewers face-to-face with the political histories embedded in image-processing technologies. Gabey Tjon a Tham’s Red Horizon uses kinetic light and sound to simulate swarm intelligence, yet it’s the afterimages – those ghostly trails on the retina—that linger as metaphors for visual memory and trauma. The real confrontation, however, comes with Rosa Menkman’s multifaceted body of work. In 0010 DE/CALIBRATION ARMY, Menkman deconstructs the so-called “neutral” standards of image calibration by exposing the racial biases encoded into visual technologies. Using historical test images of Caucasian women—once considered the norm for color correction – Menkman forms a fictional army that resists these inherited biases. Her work not only critiques past systems but also warns of their quiet persistence in contemporary AI training data. Finally, DCT:Syphoning dives into the world of JPEG compression, transforming pixel blocks into narrative agents trapped in a flatland of lost detail. Inspired by Edwin Abbott’s novella Flatland, the piece offers a poignant allegory: what happens when data efficiency flattens nuance, when the need to “compress” results in a loss of dimension, of humanity? In an era where images are generated faster than they can be understood, and where algorithms increasingly shape what we see, shows like this remind us to pause. To sit in the discomfort of the loading screen. To stay, for a moment, still processing.
LINK
https://nxtmuseum.com/exhibition/still-processing
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