Located between a primary school and a public library in the Brooklyn Greenpoint neighborhood there is a new type of “luxury” coworking space.
Nicknamed El Chat Haus, this space has many of the elements you would find in a traditional coworking office: people who bite on their computer keyboards, another person who takes a phone call, someone else who stops next to his computer to drink a sip of coffee.
However, there is a key difference: Chat Haus is a coworking space for AI chatbots, and all, including people, are made of cardboard.
More specifically, the chat haus is an art exhibition of Brooklyn’s artist Nim Ben-Reuven. It houses a handful of cardboard robots that work on their computers through movements controlled by small engines. There is a sign that offers desktop space for “only” $ 1,999 per month and another that labels the space as “a joint luxury work space for chatbots.”
Ben-Reuven told TechCrunch that he built the exhibition as a way of dealing and contributing humor to the fact that most of his work, which focuses largely on graphic design and videography, is being pushed into the world of AI. He added that independent works are already denied as companies resort to AI tools.
“It was like an expression of frustration in humor, so I am not bitter that the industry changes so fast and under my nose and I would not want to be part of the shift,” said Ben-Reuven. “So I thought, I will only fight with something silly that can laugh at myself.”
He said he also wanted to prevent this exhibition from being too negative because he did not believe that this would tell the right message. He said that creating art that is blatantly negative forces him to a corner and requires that he be defended. He added to the screen a “lighter tone” also helps attract viewers of all ages and with all the opinions about AI.
While Ben-Reuven and I were chatting in bread bread, a coffee located on the other side of the street from the window exhibition, numerous groups of people stopped to look at the chat haus. Three millennia women stopped and took pictures. A group of primary age students just outside the school stopped and asked their adult classmates.
Ben-Reuven also thought that despite what AI is doing to the industry in which he works, the situation remains lighter than some of the other horrors and trauma in today’s world.
“I mean, AI, in terms of the creative world, seems such a light thing compared to many of the others, such as war, the things that are happening in the world and as the terror and trauma that exists,” he said.
Ben-Reuven has always used cardboard in his art. He made a replica of life from an airport terminal with cardboard at the postgraduate school. Among independent works during the last decade, he has worked on the construction of these cardboard robots, or “cardboard babies” as he calls them. So, while the use of these cardboard robots was a natural option to exhibit, he joked, he also needed a reason to get them out of his apartment, the material is also providing another comment on AI.
“The impermanence of these cardboard things, and the ability to collapse even under a little weight, is how I feel that AI is interacting with creative industries,” he said. “People can make their medium -sized images that look really great on Instagram and excite 12 -year -old endless children, but with any level of scrutiny, it is garbage, and I feel that you look close enough close to these cardboard things, they are easily collapse and easily fall under weight.”
However, he understands why consumers are attracted to some art generated by AI. He compared it to junk food and the rapid action bunch that comes from eating junk food before it was digested quickly.
The Chat Haus is a temporary exhibition since the building that houses expects permits to be approved for renewal. Ben-Reuven hopes to maintain the exhibition until at least in mid-May and is hoping to move to a larger gallery if he can. He wants to add more, but he is worried where he will put any additional material in his apartment once the exhibition ends.
“I thought it would be fun to express this idea of, like a lot of cute robots, a bit creepy and spooky, writing due to our chatgpt indications in some warehouse somewhere, working without stopping as electricity as Switzerland uses in a year,” said Ben-Reuven.
The Chat Haus is currently exhibited in the 121 Norman Avenue in Brooklyn, the Greenpoint neighborhood of New York.