
18 October, 11:00 CEST - 26 October, 17:00 CET
ai, ai, ai: a space to play, fail and tinker with machines

The Hmm opens a playful AI lab during Dutch Design Week 2025 to celebrate the launch of ai, ai ai: a hands-on guide to play, fail & tinker with machines. This living publication and web project, on the topic of co-creating with AI, is developed by The Hmm and Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
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.
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 live AI experiment, see schedule below.
Practical information ai, ai, ai
📍 Location: MU Hybrid Art House, Torenallee 40-06, 5617 BD, Eindhoven
đź“… Date: 18 – 26 October 2025
🕗 Time: 11.00 – 18.00 CEST
🎟 Free access
Schedule Lunch sessions
Join a live AI assignment, guided by an artist or instructor from The Hmm. 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. Lunch is not included, but a light snack is provided. Bring your own laptop!
đź“… Dates: 18, 19, 22, 23, 24 and 25 October 2025
🕗 Time: 12.30 – 13.30 CEST
🎟 €5, reserve a spot via:
👾 18 October – Code Re-enactment, by artist Martijn van Boven
Recreate a historical computer animation by describing it in natural language.
Take a close look at a short abstract animation. Turn what you see into words, then let AI help you re-create it in code. This exercise lets you explore how animations are built, how computers “understand” descriptions, and how you can rethink what it means to translate creativity into code.
👾 19 October – Hate it, Make it
Transforming a Song You Hate to a Song you Love
Artists uncover and challenge AI’s hidden structures, raising urgent questions of ethics and authorship. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst turn AI into a collective playground with Holly+, a voice model anyone can use. In this assignment, remix Herndon’s voice and explore creativity as a shared, generative experiment.
👾 22 October – Tracing Patterns Into Noise
Find the Simplest Outline an AI Image Tool Can Make
AI image tools start with random noise and gradually turn it into pictures based on your prompt. In this session, you’ll play with “noisy” prompts—like grainy or pixelated images—to see what surprising results the AI creates. You’ll explore how the AI works step by step, while your creativity shapes the outcome.
👾23 October – Brainrot in the algorithmic abyss
Make your own brainrot character using AI tools and technologies
This assignment is inspired by Viraj Khanna’s BRAIN ROT: The Life You Live?, which transforms the hyper-digital world into playful, surreal artworks. Italian brainrot emerges from grassroots internet creativity and thrives on remixing, joy, and weirdness. In this assignment, you’ll generate your own AI-powered brainrot characters and contribute to this expanding, collaborative universe.
👾 24 October – Step by Step
A generated stop motion video
Creating single AI images is easy, but making a seamless sequence is trickier. For this assignment, you’ll generate still images to create your own stop-motion video, exploring how separate frames can flow into a continuous story. It’s inspired by the work of filmmaker Paul Trillo, who generated nearly 700 clips for The Hardest Part, a 4-minute continuous music video, earning the first Golden Nica for AI in Art in 2024.
👾 25 October – Murder a Dog, by artist Sander Veenhof
Discover the unbeatable optimism of chatbots like chatGPT by adding a radical dramatic twist in your conversation.
AI chatbots may seem simple, but there’s a lot happening behind the scenes—and even their creators can’t predict everything. In this assignment, you’ll explore their limits, rules, and safeguards, discovering their quirks and ways to push beyond their narrow, “babysat” view of the world.
♿️ You can find information on accessibility at MU here.
đź’™ ai, ai, ai is a project in collaboration with Responsible AI Lab at Hogeschool van Amsterdam and is financially made possible by Stimuleringsfonds Creative Industrie and Centre of Expertise Creative Innovation.