STAND BY/ME was conceived in early 2020—at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid starkly divergent responses from China and the United States. STAND BY/ME: Second Term is a newly envisioned iteration of the previous STAND BY/ME installation. This new version is anchored in the turbulent present: In 2025, Xi Jinping remains in power, and Donald J. Trump has returned for a second term as U.S. president, reigniting tensions between two superpowers whose ideological and technological conflicts are now sharper than ever. This new iteration updates the original system to incorporate fresh political material: recent speeches, tweets, and digital communications from both leaders. These updates not only refresh the narrative content but amplify the work’s core critique—highlighting the algorithmic volatility, repetition, and hollowness of contemporary political discourse. In doing so, it mirrors the information chaos and systemic unpredictability of our digital condition.
Both installations share the same production: an interactive installation that uses machine-learning models to generate speeches for Xi Jinping and Donald J. Trump, and uses randomness to build virtual conversations for both heads of states, while connecting the information flow with the lived reality of the Everyday. Visitors are exposed to narratives of both digital communism and digital capitalism that is randomly controlled. Next to the visual flow of randomly generated speeches, the work involves seemingly mundane, yet “super-charged” electrical household items, i.e., power sockets, as the actuality of human-technology confrontation. This work triggers questions about how technologism impacts individuals’ views and information consumption, while it associates the generation by computer systems, artificial intelligence, of speeches of extremely powerful politicians on the planet, Xi and Trump, and the link of these speeches with daily life and the random generation of rewards. The generation of speeches is associated with daily electric power and national lottery, and underlines the extent to which the artificiality of these speeches no longer meets the real.
Review from Siggraph Asia 2025:
“This work applies the Art Gallery theme “Generative Futures” to a socio-political context, presenting the uncertainty of infinitely looping political discourse generated by AI and a situation in which audience agency is stripped away. The concept is clear and compelling, and the presentation of the work stands out with its simple and austere format.”
“This piece powerfully and timely critiques algorithmic rhetoric and political staging. The fusion of generative language with a physical interface is particularly distinctive and demonstrates a strong affinity with the theme “Generative Futures.” Additionally, the use of potentially biased randomness from National Lottery data was especially thought-provoking.”
Review from ISEA 2023:
“STAND BY /ME project deals with very topical issues (post-truth, text generation, randomness in information) governing them in a single framework. The structure of the installation is described in detail and sounds coherent and convincing.”
“The STAND BY /ME associates the generation by computer systems, artificial intelligence, of speeches of extremely powerful politicians on the planet, Xi and Trump, and the link of these speeches with the daily life and the random generation of rewards. This meeting between these speeches generated by an artificial intelligence and the daily electric power and this national lottery that insists on the presence of the random and the arbitrary in life seems to me an interesting combination. The only generation of speeches would have been a little limited and too systematic. Here, associated with these 2 other elements, it underlines the extent to which the artificiality of these speeches no longer meets the real. There is a dissociation between a disconnected and predictable discourse and a daily reality lived by billions of people. One might argue that symbiosis is here present through its disappearance : politic speeches being simulated by machines which only take into account previous speeches and not connection to the real world, Standby/me emphasizes that a symbiosis based on the deep interaction between speeches and actions driven by reality constrains is on the verge to disappear.”
The STAND BY/ME installation was awarded by ARGEkultur (Salzburg, Austria) and shown at the group exhibition “POLATECH 1” in 2020 (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) and Athens Digital Arts Festival in 2022 (Athens, Greece). The “STAND BY/ME” paper was presented as short papers at ISEA2023 (Paris, France).
Setup of the grid of embedded electronics. Computer renderings. Projection interface including Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and National Lottery for real-time generated text by a machine-learning model.
A recurrent neural network (RNN) is trained with the speech and Twitter corpus and fine-tuned the parameter space to obtain realistic sounding, yet meaningless, empty artefacts of political discourse. The two “speakers” are visually juxtaposed with a simulation of randomized drawings of numbers (balls) from the National Lottery.
Embedded electronics in this work includes 30 linked power sockets, which are technologically extended with sound and light actuation.
Exhibition view. STAND BY/ME was shown in the group exhibition “POLATECH 1” together with with work of Ansgar Silies,Till Nachtmann,Stefan Silies in the period of 27th of August till 6th of September in 2020 at Albert van Abbehuis, Eindhoven. Related link: https://www.albertvanabbehuis.com/artist-in-residence-2020
During 18TH Athens Digital Arts Festival, STAND BY/ME is participated in the “installations” session between 25-29, June in 2022. Related link: https://www.2022.adaf.gr/program/standby-me/