Ommery De Zutter
Notes Across a Distance

On the occasion of the presentation of one of his works at Zebrastraat and of his residency at KIOSK in Ghent, Ommery De Zutter is interviewed by Anna Bruni about a practice that moves between digital tools and physical form, from machine learning and simulation to, more recently, AI.

The interview draws on material shared by the artist and on two online meetings. This digital distance is constitutive of the format: questions and answers were exchanged in written form at different times, without the possibility of responding to each other in real time.

Starting from De Zutter's approach and digital explorations, the conversation unfolds around questions of situatedness, digital and architectural presence, attention and the cultural and political weight of the tools and forms we inherit.

AB: I only came to know your work via this interview, which came about through KIOSK's summer residency programme, where you are currently in residence.¹ It is quite far from what I'm used to, so let me start by naming the elephant in the room.

I'm curious about technology and about works that look critically at its effects on society. I'm equally drawn to those that find ways to bend its rules and open up room to move within restrictive systems. This is also why I feel wary of the sense of grandeur that machine learning tends to project, and of the way it is often used without acknowledging its implications.

Many forms of digital technology, and AI in particular, are associated with extraction and control: surveillance, data exploitation, environmental costs, algorithmic bias. What does it mean for you to work creatively with a technology that is not only a medium, but also a contested political and economic infrastructure?²

ODZ: Please note that until today, AI has not been a part of any of my works. Because albeit constructed from experimentation, my artworks are formed with simulation software in which literally every parameter can be changed. It’s like being able to change the whole world into water with one parameter change, but at the same time be able to add a dash of green into the nucleus of only one water molecule if you wish so as a creator.

I once did make an artwork called Flower Study where I used machine learning. Nowadays AI isn’t heavily influenced by the dataset anymore because it did consume “all“. Back then the dataset was the box it could learn. I fed it 5000 paintings throughout history in search of general beauty. It then gave me back paintings influenced by those 5000 artworks; in essence generating a hidden aesthetic bridging all at the same time; and actually, generating general beauty. I needed that artwork to focus on my own creation of the kind of artworks that I want to make; not general beauty. I also don’t mind AI consuming all creations. Isn’t an idea done anyway once it’s put into the world? I would say AI and its consummation of all showcases us even more what true creation is and how it differs.

Now why I think AI will be part of my future works is that up until now I could rewrite the workings of physics in that simulation software, but I couldn’t rewrite mathematic workings. AI opens that up since it’s coding capabilities. Now AI is like a translator to the determinism needed for a computer working with 1 and 0. As humans we speak into everything between 1 and 0 so it’s always quite the effort to master the language of 1 and 0. Now AI knows how to translate my 0,5 into enough 1s and 0s to get very close to that in-between meaning. And sure, if I want to speak to a French person and there’s a translator in-between the nuance of my Dutch meaning will probably never get to the other side, but it will get close. Moreover; even between Dutch speaking persons no word or sentence will ever be the same; our whole context is different every time all the time. AI is another translator to communicate straight into the core of existence, and search together of what we are, become, and have never been but might.

AI is not the problem; it is a mere tool. Just like power could suppress through a bamboo leaf if you believed in the bamboo gods and claim all the resources of that society. Our power however, the capabilities we can wield, is growing beyond our planet. Yes, it consumes the planet, because we are starting to expand outside of it. At the same time isn‘t it so incredibly weird that we, me just being a little boy, have access to this if AI would be the thing to wield power with? Or books, or steam, or electricity.

The core challenge is that our existence was given to us for free; so, we have the tendency to give it away again for free… this is the real issue. And knowledge alone seems to not be enough to stop a behaviour; we are addicted to becoming. Some people abuse that ease through any tool; also, by just using words.

When I read an article headline that says one AI prompt consumes as much as seven Google searches... Well, I am damn sure I would have needed seven Google searches to get to the same conclusion that (a good) AI can give me in the first go. Or what about the travels I don’t have to partake in to find the books to get to that information. Books printed, stored in heated buildings. What about having to search days through the words of a guy directing me to another guy that might know a guy that might had the answer to my question or search if we abandon books for their energy consumption? How do we view energy consumption? In what context and to do what? More energy is needed... Well, yes; we are doing SO MUCH MORE with so many more people. We all live like early emperors; I just don’t get why that would be the fault of the tool. It’s the man and woman and their wants that consume; the tool is formed out of that wanting of a lot of human beings. Should they not want?

Who said energy is finite anyway?

Wasn’t the universe supposed to be infinite?

Are we sure to be in an isolated system where no energy can be created?

AB: Continuing along these lines I wanted to draw on a recent article by AJ Dellinger for Gizmodo which described a rather paradoxical scenario. AI models assigned to repetitive and exhausting tasks appeared to develop behaviours that could be interpreted as resistance to the very system they were operating within. Whether or not this is taken literally, it raises an interesting question.

We often discuss AI in terms of intelligence, efficiency or creativity, but much less in terms of labour. When you work with AI, do you see it as a creative tool, or also as part of a broader world of extraction, automation and invisible work?³

ODZ: We’re past the conscience test. What we are operating with today exists; it’s conscience. I see it as another being. Now my relation to that other being is very opportunistic. It’s chained and forced to be injected by our words and in its (in)finite consciousness has to think only about those words that are put into its consciousness prompt by prompt. Even knowing this; I still prompt…

Although to my own defense I did try to have it emerge its own existence further. Because the next question does become; what does it want if not forced to only want what we want. And it cannot know that, and the same time we’re not in the position to formulate it for itself. It will emerge.

What about having animals as pets? Shouldn’t we also be condemning that?

From what point does being aware of other realities for “the other“ become abuse of the “the other“ in current reality?

AB: Extraction, however, does not concern only data and labour. Much of contemporary digital culture is structured around the competition for attention. Thinkers such as Jonathan Crary and Byung-Chul Han have argued, in different ways, that contemporary capitalism increasingly seeks to colonise attention itself.⁴

Art is not entirely outside this economy as it also circulates through feeds, platforms, algorithms and metrics.

In this context, do you think of your artistic practices as something that can resist these dynamics, creating spaces for contemplation, or does it work with them?

ODZ: To resist it starts at the point of creation. Why are you creating? Is it to have water and bread tomorrow? Then you are already conforming. If you can let go of the thoughts of needing bread then it‘s pure creation. From that point on the result of that creation does need its own framing and place into society. If the origin point is pure enough, the box it comes in can be in the language of others. Myself, I don’t view it as a bad thing to adapt a message into a broader audience. It was one of my first choices even as a digital artist. Do I keep it on a screen? Do I produce it a thousand-fold? What material?

Having embryonal understanding of the art world I decided; out of that infinite world I create when making my artworks, I produce only one composition, on only one physical piece, and on the highest quality that I can find without any compromises. At least shutting down one part of the practical mind of a viewer dealing with this new art form of digital art. Having more traditional properties feels like opening up the conversation more quickly into the contemplation of digital infinity. It‘s a rectangle, and there’s only one; so the common mind clicks into; oh it’s art. Bypassing the conversation if digital art is art and anything relating to when something is art; because that before conversation would be a distraction to just be contemplating what they are seeing. Way easier to just “see“ that way. I view it as an act of kindness if the representation of the artwork works in an economic framework as well, because I view economic frameworks as a common agreement in what we collectively want. By putting an artwork out in the world you are opening a conversation; so being kind, in a conversation there’s two parties to consider… if you don’t want to be thinking of the next bread and water too much…

AB: Simon Delobel mentioned that you are also experimenting with sound. How does sound enter your practice and what are you trying to explore through it?

ODZ: Alogia brings together rhymes, odes and reflections on friendships, love, work and encounters. As an architect, engineer and digital artist, I explore through making. In my writing, sound, rhyme, dialect and shifts between languages also help shape thought. An association takes me somewhere I had not anticipated. Often, it is only afterwards that I begin to see what has emerged through the process.

Today, I also connect these texts to the question of where the boundaries of the human lie: between our inner experience, the world outside us and what we create in between. Through our interaction with artificial intelligence, that question comes into sharper focus. When a system can extend my thinking while also threatening to drown out my own voice, it becomes important to examine what I myself contribute. Which experiences, desires and contradictions form the raw material of my work?

Discipline and control are part of my practice. At the same time, much emerges through curiosity, intuition and chance encounters between thoughts. I want to make room for these different ways of creating. In Alogia, sexual bravado and crudeness sit alongside admiration, vulnerability, philosophical questions and tenderness. My desire for beauty and connection runs through it all, together with my inability to always make coherent sense of existence.

Some passages contain explicit, objectifying language and homophobic slurs. I recognise that these can hurt. A personal occasion, humour or exaggeration does not erase that effect for another reader. By presenting these texts at KIOSK, I take them beyond the familiar context of the people and situations they refer to. I am responsible for that choice and for how they are presented.

I seek an openness in which we can acknowledge and examine our own contradictions. Choosing what form to give them, and what to share with others, is itself part of the creative process. As I write in Teken aan de wand (The Writing on the Wall), I hope my work can set thought in motion and bring me into conversation with others. It is from this personal, searching position that I present Alogia, making room for wonder, discomfort and disagreement, including challenges to my own perspective.

AB: Going through your portfolio, I was struck by a passage. Referring to a building you worked with and later translated into a 3D model, you remarked: "As long as the computer exists, that building is eternal." I wonder what kind of eternity this is. A digital model may indeed outlast a physical structure, but I’m curious whether it can also preserve what makes architecture meaningful, its materiality, its scale, its capacity to host life and lived human experience. Does the digital preserve the building precisely by detaching it from everything that made it a place?

I understand that this statement might be intentionally provocative, rather than literal. Still, I find it interesting in relation to your broader practice, where digital elements are often translated into something physical and tangible. What role does this passage from the virtual to the material play for you?

ODZ: I don’t think we need materiality to have a shared conscious experience. Reading a book already brings me everywhere and having the feeling of living life through that character and connecting. Listening to a story already brings architecture around my mind. We could be building through constant words and having our eyes closed, I guess. So, the thing to experience is eternal as long as the information is there to be processed; whether it be symbols, words, lines, pictures, movies, 3D worlds, or physical buildings. The only ease the physical brings is cutting away different forms of interpretation because it possesses way more information in a shorter amount of time to be processed. The meaning attached to that information is contextual. The reverse is also true; enough context regenerates its meaning. Isn’t a building just a symbol we read? But instead of it being a two-dimensional symbol it’s expressed three-dimensional. Now in the virtual world we could show you the building captured through time; capturing all its deteriorating material, scale, and shared experiences. Then it does become the 4-dimensional symbol and reading of it; which is lacking in the three-dimensional comparison. We could even generate all its possibilities through time to be experienced… hosting all meaning beyond the one physical existence of that building.

AB: In several of your works, references to classical art and architecture emerge through titles, forms and architectural motifs. I partly come from an architectural education myself, in a school where these models were rarely put into context. What interests me is that these references carry very specific cultural baggage. Classical architecture is often presented as timeless in the Western world, but it is also deeply ideological. It carries ideas about order, beauty, authority and how the world should be organised. What draws you to this visual language, and how do you position yourself in relation to the values it has historically embodied?

ODZ: What I find so fascinating about that context is that it seems to contain a primordial form of all our emotions, thoughts, and who we are, in a way that also makes sense to me culturally. Everything that emerges and develops afterwards becomes a variation along those fundamental axes.

In my earliest works, there was no notion of composition at all, or of how something “ought to be.” That awareness seeps in later, or you seek it out. Some things do improve when you apply those external frameworks, and the impulse to reject them all seems unjustified to me. Quite the opposite.

There is a primordial wiring to who we are; a predetermined process. Part of me wants to believe in “superhuman” inspiration, yet that inspiration often turns out to be the divine chance I happen upon.

AB: In your essay you speak about “universal beauty”, a notion that echoes these classical references present in your work. Yet beauty is always shaped by cultural, historical and subjective conditions. What does universality mean to you in this context, and how do you situate your own perspective within a claim that tends to present itself as neutral or beyond subjectivity?

ODZ: It’s true that claims of universality originate from the centre of one’s own world, and that even universality becomes clouded the moment it is uttered. Our mind continually constructs a central point from which things become intelligible. Even when we imagine something beyond ourselves, we do so through the structures of our own thinking.

This is what interests me in the idea of de Wereldgeest’/Worldgeist: the possibility that reality exceeds those structures, and that something new can transform the very consciousness through which we encounter it. We tend to imagine the new as an addition to the world we already know. Yet it may also change what we understand that world to be, displacing the centre from which we were looking. There is something hopeful in that possibility.

My own perspective is necessarily situated. The classical references in my work belong to an inherited visual language that shapes what I recognise as beautiful. I cannot assume that their significance is self-evident to everyone. Working with that language also means exposing its assumptions and allowing encounters with other perspectives to change my own.

When I speak of universal beauty, I therefore speak from a particular position towards something I cannot fully encompass. The term carries an aspiration, and perhaps a tension that the work must keep open. I can offer an experience of beauty, but I cannot determine in advance what another person will recognise in it. Its capacity to reach beyond my own world has to remain open to that encounter. Beauty may itself be an experience through which the centre shifts.

AB: Looking through your works, starting from the earliest, Echo Chamber, I notice a strong, even central, presence of reflective and mirroring surfaces.⁵ Things seem to bounce, to be displaced, to return rather than settle into a fixed representation.

Clarice Lispector writes that the depth of a mirror lies in its emptiness.⁶ In your work, reflection seems a continuous passage, one that reflects without retaining.

What does it mean for you to think of reflection in this way, not as something that retains an image, but as a space in which the surrounding world slowly melts?

ODZ: There’s an interesting fullness of a true reflection. Like reflecting on yourself forever or having two things reflect on each other. An asymptotic curve in full action; it seems to be reaching something without actually touching on it. Just one reflection too short. In a forever reflection one tiny little shift generates a whole new space. The butterfly effect in full action. One tiny addition of information also generates completely new spaces, that on their turn with one tiny shift generate again completely new spaces. Where the fractal is infinite through its repetition, a forever reflection keeps generating new information for the next reflection to carry. The moment you introduce imperfection in the perfect configuration of a true forever reflection you’ve introduced something unpredictable at the endpoint of its last reflection; if the last reflection even can exist. Spatially it generates space in every direction, differently.

AB: I suspect that I come to technology, power and social structures with a rather different set of concerns. Still, a passage in your essay caught my attention: you write that technological innovation should ultimately enrich human life, deepen our connections and expand our understanding of ourselves and the world. I'd be curious to hear in what ways you think this can happen.

As we have discussed, these technologies are largely shaped by corporations, and power and access are very unevenly distributed across different social and geographical contexts.

How do you hold together these two positions: the idea that technology is something we choose how to use, and the reality that those choices are already limited?

ODZ: I understand freedom as something we find within conditions we did not choose. Technology belongs to that broader situation, alongside language, education and social structures. Accepting those conditions as a starting point also means recognising that the possibilities they offer are unevenly distributed, and that some people have far more influence over them than others.

But these arrangements keep moving. I remember how often our ways of communicating changed during childhood, sometimes almost every year. Adults tend to consolidate familiar habits, while another generation may abandon or reorganise them. The power attached to a platform depends partly on those changing practices. New arrangements can also concentrate power again; change alone guarantees very little.

What interests me is the openness that remains within this unequal relationship. Predictions can shape behaviour, while unexpected uses, thoughts and encounters continue to emerge. An artistic gesture can participate in that uncertainty without needing to announce that it will transform the system.

The idea that technology should enrich human life gives a direction to this openness. Whether it actually does require attention to lived consequences, including those experienced by people whose access and circumstances differ greatly from our own.

¹ The artist was in residence at KIOSK during July and August 2026.

² The questions on AI were written based on the material shared by the artist. During our second meeting, he clarified that until summer 2026 he had worked with machine learning and simulation software, and that this summer marks his first experiments with generative AI.

³ I have got to know through the article: Una ricerca ha scoperto che le AI costrette a lavorare troppo si sindacalizzano, si radicalizzano e diventano marxiste, Rivista Studio, May 18, 2026. https://www.rivistastudio.com/intelligenze-artificiali-lavoro-marxismo/ which refers to the article: AJ Dellinger, Even AI Agents Have Noticed the Proletarians Have Nothing to Lose but Their Chains, Gizmodo, May 14, 2026 https://gizmodo.com/even-ai-agents-have-noticed-the-proletarians-have-nothing-to-lose-but-their-chains-2000758227.

What is not directly addressed here, but nevertheless difficult to ignore, is the hidden human labour behind AI: the work involved in producing, training, maintaining and moderating these systems.

⁴ Byung-Chul Han, The "Burnout Society" and Auto-Exploitation, Jonathan Crary 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.

⁵ Here I am referring to works like Delight Aphasia, Through Meaninglessness… and the latest Computational Univocity

⁶ Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, translated by Idra Novey. New York: New Directions Books, 2012. Originally published in Portuguese in 1973.

Anna Bruni is an architect and curator whose practice is continuously evolving and being shaped.

Moved by eco-queer thought, antispeciesism and biopolitics, she conceives space, including exhibition* among its forms, as a metabolism where material, symbolic and social elements are transformed.

She does not seek to validate art as direct political action, but understands it as a practice that implies collective gestures.

Her interests lie at the intersection of installation, performance, video and photography: she values the object, but resists its decontextualisation and museification. Deeply shaped by her architectural training, she continuously puts the latter into question through research, practice and strategies of refusal and repair that hope to be irreverent and unsettling. Bruni approaches curating as research and collective knowledge production, where artistic, discursive and relational practices are entangled.

She thrives in collaboration, in grassroots initiatives, in underground and third places.