Everything Else: THE JUNK MACHINE: Basel II

A special edition to celebrate THE JUNK MACHINE being a part of the Digital Art Mile in Basel, Switzerland during Art Basel 2025.

What happens when advertising is corrupted by AI? In THE JUNK MACHINE, ClownVamp explores how open-source AI models are infesting marketing technology, amplifying the biases of the past into the very futuristic present. To explore this, he built a very pink physical robot (The Junk Machine) with an embedded NVIDIA Jetson robotics computer and a locally stored version of SDXL Turbo (a lightweight AI model).

Upon pushing a big red button, the machine generates in real-time a piece of AI Junk Mail and prints it out at 6" x 6" using an onboard dye sublimation printer. For THE JUNK MACHINE Curated, ClownVamp selected 222 outputs from the machine that best represented the intention of the work, upscaled them to 12K resolution, and color-graded them. These 1980s callbacks, sloppy and drenched in hot pink, show the biases and patterns rife in AI. Without demographic prompting, the models are consistently white, most likely blond if female, and at the ripe marketing age of 25 to 35.