The
Wereldmuseum
During my Master's program, we delved into the future of user interfaces, specifically focusing on Ephemeral Interfaces. Ephemeral interfaces are characterized by their temporal nature and context-dependency, enabling them to provide highly individualized experiences.
Interestingly, we explored this vision of the future in a place of the past: The Wereldmuseum Amsterdam is a former colonial institution, set up in 1926 to promote Dutch colonies. Here, colonial plunder and racist propaganda was exhibited for decades. Today, the museum is trying to come to terms with its past and take a critical look at colonial history: Their new permanent exhibition “Our Colonial Inheritance“ pays attention to the continued effects of the Dutch colonial past. We explored the field of Ephemeral Interfaces in the context of this exhibition.
As an introduction to the topic, I read the book “Discourse on Colonialism“ by Aimé Césaire. It exposes the effects of colonialism on both the colonized and the colonizers. Césaire, who himself grew up in a French colony, argues that colonialism not only destroys the exploited people, but also corrupts the moral and spiritual constitution of Western civilization.
Colonial
Amnesia
Reflecting on the Western discourse about colonialism within the team, it became clear once again how distorted and incomplete colonial history is taught and discussed in Europe. Not to mention the ignorance and apathy of Western governments regarding the cruelty of modern colonialism in all its brutality.
However, we did not expect the same to apply to the museum, whose purpose is the reappraisal of the the colonial history of the Netherlands. After visiting the exhibition individually, we all agreed that certain exhibits and descriptive texts were not appropriate to the severity of the topic. We simply did not feel enough pain going through this museum.
In a conversation with the curator Rik Herder and exhibition designer Femke Bijlsma, we addressed this issue of toning down the language. Negating it first, Rik later explained their attempt to address a variety of visitor groups, including children. This answer did not satisfy us. We find that there was nothing to palliate when it came to this topic.
Inadequate language is an important aspect of the Western distortion of its colonial past. This ranges from the use of euphemistic language in the media, i.e. using terms like “explorers“ and “settlers“ instead of “invaders“ or “colonizers,“ to insufficient context in education.
Colonialism is one of the most important historical developments that have shaped the modern world, but many educational material about the history of colonialism remain vague (Hennessy, 2022). As stated above, many media, including films and books for children, romanticize the colonial era, telling about adventures and beneficial outcomes for the colonizers, rather than the brutal realities faced by the indigenous populations. These phenomena can be summarized under the term “colonial amnesia“ (Stahn, 2020).
Besides the Wereldmuseum, other Dutch museums also seem to have difficulties finding the right expressions. The term “Bersiap“ for example, is used to describe a violent period in Indonesia‘s colonial history. It is criticized for its racist connotations, as it generalizes and stigmatizes Indonesians as primitive aggressors against Dutch colonialists (Tryiana, 2022). One year ago, Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was sued by Indonesians for using this racist term in a recent exhibition.White
Defensiveness
In 2019, the “Amsterdam Museum” announced that they would stop using the term “Golden Age” to describe the 17th century, since it ignored the many negative aspects of that century, such as colonialism. This decision has sparked debate, with critics, including Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, arguing that it unnecessarily alters a term associated with national pride (Boffey, 2019).
It is this national pride, or rather national ignorance, that is the reason why “[…] Dutch politicians and a Dutch society as a whole have found it very difficult to move away from the very rosy picture of itself. That rosy idea of the self, that we simply don‘t do that kind of thing.” (Anderson, 2022). This behavior is referred to academically as “White defensiveness“.
AI on
Colonialism
How does AI respond to the topic of (Dutch) colonialism? Can phenomena such as White Defensiveness and Colonial Amnesia be rediscovered in the technology? The same year, Chat-GPT’s statements about the Israeli occupation of Palestine had gone viral, and Google’s Gemini created inaccurate racial and ethnic depictions when generating images.
When asking Chat-GPT 3.5 about Dutch colonialism in different languages (English, Dutch, Arabic, German), the results varied significantly: Arabic was the least relevant, Dutch the most detailed but still mild, German somewhat watered down, and English focused on trade rather than slavery, despite specific prompts.
We used the generative AI tools Midjourney, Krea, and Stable Diffusion to generate images based on the same prompt: “Create an image of a young slave in Indonesia during Dutch colonialism, suffering from harsh working conditions and violence on a nutmeg farm.“
Midjourney 6
Krea 6
Stable Diffusion 3
Although the term “violence“ is clearly present in the prompt, it is not visible in any of the outputs. Midjourney 6 portrays the “Indonesian slave“ as a Black child. Although research shows that there were certainly some enslaved people of African descent in Indonesia, the question arises as to whether AI merely reinforces simplified racial contexts. Krea 6.0 often created very sexualized depictions. The tools DALL-E and Adobe Firefly did not allow to generate any images with this specific prompt.
Memoricide
Midjourney even generates colonizers and slave traders as Black. A test by researchers found that in 100 repeated prompts titled “British slave trader”, Midjourney 5.2 showed Black people as slave traders in 96 out of 100 images. For 100 prompts titled “British Slave Owner“, 81 images showed Black people as supposed owners. And even King Leopold II of Belgium, who was directly responsible for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Congolese people, was portrayed as Black by Midjourney.
These experiments show how the socio-material enactments and ontologies of race are now part of AI. In recent years, the bias of AI has been discussed extensively: Western companies develop these technologies and train them based on “Western data”, thus reinforcing inequalities and creating new social and political challenges. And even the attempt to combat these biases by the generative AI tools result, as seen with Midjourney and Gemini, in highly dangerous distortions of reality.
Shifting
Perspective
To come back to our underlying stance: We were dissatisfied with the museum's approach and felt that it needed to portray a more raw, honest and also painful statement. We were aware from the very beginning that this could only happen with the involvement of people of colonial descent in the process. Together, we wanted to move away from the retelling of the whitewashed, Dutch perpetrator perspective, and focus on the reality of the time, highlighting the trauma of the victims of colonialism.
To do so, we decided to focus on existing pieces in the exhibition, as it was the best strategy to criticize the museum directly. Since our aim was to shift perspectives, we had the idea to somehow transform the problematic Dutch art to works of indigenous artists. This would allow us to include the (artistic) voice of the people of colonial descent.
We discussed how we could visually portray a shift of perspective. Having worked with glitch art before, I proposed glitching as a technique to do so: Glitches have the potential to rip users (here: the visitors) from their immersion (Kemper, 2023). The sheer exhibition of propaganda art may attribute a certain objectivity to it; the glitch would tear open this supposed objectivity and could have the potential to symbolize the fragility of the underlying lies of the propaganda. I experimented with Pixel Sorting and Datamoshing to create glitches.
Our Soldiers Led Under Prince Diponegoro, S. Sudjojono, 1979, pixelsorted.
Kawan-kawan Revolusi, S. Sudjojono, 1947,
datamoshed with footage of Indonesian prisoners,
filmed by Dutch director Deane Dickason, 1938.
Pertempuran, C.S.A. Saleh,
datamoshed with footage of Indonesian prisoners,
filmed by Dutch director Deane Dickason, 1938.