At Antwerp Art Weekend, two standout exhibitions by Eddie Peake and the Amsterdam-based collective Metahaven explored how meaning shifts or falls apart in an age shaped by AI, identity, and emotional complexity.
Metahaven’s film follows a character interacting with an AI assistant while exploring poetry by Eugene Ostashevsky. It contrasts AI’s predictive language models with the unpredictable nature of poetry, using visual metaphors to expose how AI mimics language without fully grasping it.
Meanwhile, Peake’s immersive installation at TICK TACK turned the Belgian gallery into a psychological labyrinth, combining architectural intrusion, raw paintings, and a haunting audio piece. His work considers the weight of identity, sexuality, and memory, moving from aggression to vulnerability.
Despite their differences, both projects provoke questions about how language, identity, and emotion are formed and fractured. Each invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries of expression in a world increasingly influenced by AI and abstraction.
Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot!
Triplegangers, was forced offline after a bot from OpenAI relentlessly scraped its website, treating it like a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The AI bot sent tens of thousands of server requests, attempting to download hundreds of thousands of detailed 3D images and descriptions from the company’s extensive database of digital human models.
The sudden spike in traffic crippled Ukrainian Triplegangers’ servers and left CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk grappling with an unexpected problem. The company, which sells digital assets to video game developers and 3D artists, discovered that OpenAI’s bot operated across hundreds of IP addresses to gather its data. Despite having terms of service that forbid such scraping, the company had not configured the necessary robot.txt file to block the bot.
After days of disruption, Tomchuk implemented protective measures by updating the robot.txt file and using Cloudflare to block specific bots. However, he remains frustrated by the lack of transparency from OpenAI and the difficulty in determining exactly what data was taken. With rising costs and increased monitoring now necessary, he warns that other businesses remain vulnerable.
Tomchuk criticised AI companies for placing the responsibility on small businesses to block unwanted scraping, comparing it to a digital shakedown. “They should be asking permission, not just scraping data,” he said, urging companies to take greater precautions against AI crawlers that can compromise their sites.
