Tromarama

In Spring 2026, The Kitchen will debut 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 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 will develop a new work using context conditioning to an AI model, using 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), 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 projections 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 will activate the space during the exhibition and in a series of live events, offering audiences shared moments of participation and reflection.

A conceptual extension of their recent residency at Art Explora – Cité internationale des arts in Paris and their 2025 exhibition Ping Inside Noisy Giraffe at the Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation in Seoul, the installation generates sounds and texts drawn from the scanned media. The resulting environment is at once playful and reflective, interrogating how even moments of leisure can be subsumed within systems of productivity.

To further expand the project’s dialogue and visibility, The Kitchen will host a robust set of live programs including performances that activate the installation, public dialogues, and community workshops that examine the intersections of sound, image, and critique within contemporary transnational contexts.

Extending beyond the gallery, 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. The work ultimately positions the exhibition itself as a dynamic site of critical exchange—one that invites audiences to consider how technological mediation structures both private and collective experience.

Upon a Machine is organized by Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Production by David Riley, Production & Exhibitions Manager, and Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor.