Harm van den Berg
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Short Circuit
(2025)Sound installationIn Short Circuit, an artificial intelligence system is deconstructed by feeding it complex prompts and jailbreak techniques. Pushed beyond its capacity to generate coherent responses, the AI begins to stumble, revealing traces of its internal processes and exposing aspects of its architecture through sound.
The resulting output consists of human-like vocalizations generated using the system's default male voice. Rather than producing comprehensible language, the AI emits bizarre, non-existent, language-like fragments, a kind of speaking in tongues. These sounds suggest an urge to communicate while simultaneously resisting meaning. Much like the self-organizing patterns in nature that I explore through drawing, these outputs emerge from iterative and hidden rules. Here, the system is disrupted and no longer stabilizes into recognizable form but instead fractures into unpredictable fragments.
A total of 115 audio fragments were recorded in high quality to preserve their full sonic character, including their harsh, lo-fi qualities. Presented through a high-end speaker mounted on a stand, the fragments play in random order, creating an ever-shifting composition.
The alien-sounding audio raises the question: who or what are we truly inviting into our world through these technologies?
Listen to an audio excerpt:
Invisibility of Colour
(2024)Sound installationFor Invisibility of Colour I asked hundreds of people which colours they found beautiful or interesting. I recorded their responses and transformed them into sound samples. This collection of spoken colours is played through 24 invisible loudspeakers arranged in a grid behind a large white canvas, spreading across its surface in clusters. The sounds move slowly or rapidly, form temporary connections, and disappear again. Rather than a pre-composed musical piece, the work functions as a sound painting that is constantly changing and always in the process of becoming.
I developed the sound installation in 2022 with the support of a development grant from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK). The Invisibility of Colour was presented twice as a solo exhibition in 2023. For each presentation, I adapted the installation to the architecture of the exhibition space. At puntWG, the work took the form of a freestanding square panel measuring 3 × 3 metres with a depth of 5 cm. At Gallery SANAA in Utrecht, it was presented as a wall-filling canvas measuring 5 × 2.5 metres with a depth of 5 cm.
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Emergent Clocks(2023-2024)
SoftwareWhile my drawings are records of an emergent process, my sound works allow that emergent process to unfold in real time. The sound installations are driven by Emergent Clocks, a software program I developed in collaboration with Coen Konings, that uses an algorithm to spontaneously organise sounds and distribute them across 24 loudspeakers. The result is a sound composition that takes shape on site, continuously evolving and never the same twice.Emergent Clocks was initially developed for the installation Invisibility of Colour to create an immersive soundscape by distributing audio samples across a wide rectangular grid of loudspeakers hidden behind a large white canvas.
The Longest Distance(2018)
Sound installation The Longest Distance is a large-scale sound installation consisting of loudspeakers hidden behind a large white canvas. Two very different sounds can be heard: the faint cosmic background radiation left over from the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, and the heartbeat of an unborn baby.The heartbeat represents what is closest, an intimate rhythm inside a human body within a human body, while the cosmic background radiation represents what is farthest away.
As you stand before the canvas, the heartbeat appears to emerge from a single point, while the cosmic sound surrounds you and fills the room.
Listen to an audio excerpt: