Tromarama

The Kitchen is pleased to present a newly commissioned project by Tromarama, the Indonesian art collective founded in 2006 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena. Known for their investigations into hyperreality and the porous boundaries between virtual and physical worlds, Tromarama creates immersive, multimedia environments that merge video, installation, and algorithmic processes.

Marking the collective’s first institutional exhibition in the United States, the project at The Kitchen extends their ongoing inquiry into the blurred lines between labor and leisure through the use of artificial intelligence. Departing from earlier works that mined social media data, Tromarama has developed a new work using context conditioning to an AI model, fed with their personal literary and music archives. This more intimate dataset becomes a lens through which the artists examine how personal and social histories are reinterpreted and remixed by generative technologies.

Two literary and cultural references anchor the project: The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck (1992–94) by Don Rosa, a serialized comic tracing capital accumulation through nostalgia, and How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1971), a pioneering Marxist critique by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. By bringing these works into dialogue, Tromarama examines how global pop culture constructs myths of wealth, labor, and aspiration within postcolonial and rapidly digitizing economies. These texts appear in the installation as karaoke-style video paired with a sound composition that reinterprets Disney’s 1940 anthem, “When You Wish Upon a Star.” Played on recorders and integrated into the sculptural installation, the sonic abstraction of the iconic melody activate the space during the exhibition and in a series of live events, offering audiences shared moments of participation and reflection.

Live performances will activate the installation throughout the exhibition run, featuring different singers, musicians, and dancers (gospel, opera, jazz, and tap) who improvise in response to AI-generated prompts on April 23, May 15, and June 12 (8 p.m.). These events, along with public panels and workshops, extend the installation’s inquiry into collective interpretation, authorship, work, and machine-led composition within a global, techno-saturated culture landscape, underscoring the importance of human expression inside technological frameworks. The project considers how information, images, and sound circulate across physical and digital networks, shaping experience and perception. By tracing these flows, Tromarama reflects on the entanglements of technology, consumer culture, and daily life, and on how intelligent systems mediate acts of seeing, listening, and participation. Ultimately, the work positions the exhibition as a dynamic site of critical exchange that invites audiences to consider how technological mediation structures both private and collective experience.

The Kitchen will welcome families into the gallery space for family workshops across May and June (dates: 5/9, 5/16, 5/30, 6/6) to engage with the exhibition and create found object sculptures inspired by the work. We will source recycled materials for families to use to build their sculptures together with the guidance of a teaching artist. This will take place on designated family hours, from 11am to 1pm. Workshops will be drop-in, so families can come and go as they please. The Kitchen is pleased to partner with Artists & Mothers on the May 30 workshop.

Upon a Machine is organized by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs with support from Fernanda Escalera Zambrano, Operations Manager, Angelique Rosales-Salgado, Assistant Curator, and Curatorial Intern Emma Huerta. Production by David Riley, Production & Exhibitions Manager, and Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor.