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Black Box Memory
VR Video, Puppet

Black Box Memory examines how cultural memory is increasingly absorbed into Large Language Model (LLM) systems, where fragments of the past are transformed into generated narratives of ambiguous origin.

The work questions how these models simulate familiar forms of remembrance and knowledge while detaching them from lived experience, body, and continuity. A life-sized puppet evoking the image of a storytelling grandmother wears a ceramic mask referencing objects as memory carriers. In VR, visitors encounter its digital counterpart, which recounts a plausible yet unverifiable past, exposing a break between embodied cultural transmission and synthetic reconstruction.

More information under:

hanna-hofmann.com/black-box-memory

Advanced Colour Terms
2025 - Installation - Metal, Code, Sound & Light

Advanced Colour Terms is an installation that explores how language shapes our perception of colour. Two industrial pipes—mirroring the space’s architecture—rise from the floor: one emits shifting light, the other strange, generated speech. A machine learning model, trained on 300+ global colour terms, invents speculative new descriptors, imagining how non-human intelligence might name colour. Spoken through one pipe the other emits the corresponding colour in real time, creating a feedback loop between synthetic language and visual perception. The work bridges linguistic data and sensory experience, questioning perception’s boundaries while reflecting on the loss—and potential rebirth—of language through technology.

More information under:
hanna-hofmann.com/act

Usubuki_01
2025 - Ceramics & Arduino

The work combines ceramic mask-making with embedded mini displays for eyes. Usobuki is a Kyōgen mask known for its exaggerated crossed eyes and puckered mouth, representing humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Actors wearing Usobuki masks can portray human characters, as well as the spirits of animals and fragile insects, such as moths, mosquitoes, and cicadas. The work reflects on how craft practices increasingly coexist and change with digital media. Rather than replacing tradition, the piece imagines a cyborgian future of craftsmanship, where analogue material knowledge and algorithmic processes become entangled.

Audiovisual Exploration of the International Phonetic Alphabet
2024 - Bachelor Thesis

In my bachelor thesis I developed a creative visual approach to the IPA and designed a learning website. In the second part of her thesis, she experimented with code, AI speech recognition and TouchDesigner as an audio visualisation tool to present scientific studies on the visual association of sounds.

The aim of these approaches is to make IPA tangible and bring phonetics to life through visual experiments. Visual research emphasises the tonal nuances and diversity of human language - while drawing attention to the importance of language learning and linguistic diversity.

In a world where 1500 languages will become extinct by the end of the century, the artist is personally committed to raising awareness of the science of linguistics. The result comprises two books: divided into a scientific part, which records the research results, and a creative catalogue, which brings together all IPA phonemes and their visual translations.

In addition, a learning website was completed & presented together with an interactive exhibition at the Language Centre Weimar in January 2024.

Lift: Crossing Spaces
2024 - Inflatable & Live Performance

Lift: Crossing Spaces is live Video Performance. Embedded in a bubble, the environment is transformed into a resonance chamber in which sound waves and light pulses replace the familiar dynamics of movement. The artist manipulates sound frequencies and visual projections in real time, creating a dialogue between movement and stillness. The work dissects the relationship between technology, transportation, and human perception.

Déjà Vu
2024 - Performance curated by Ueno_Syndicate

Déjà Vu was a performance on 22.03.24 at Beaux-Arts in Paris, that explores memory
and permanence. Roman tattoos a poem onto a wooden arm, symbolizing the act of etching memories onto an unyielding surface. On three screens behind him, fragmented memories from our time in Japan are abstractly displayed through projection mapping, point clouds and use of 3D scanned objects that also symbolize
something new created from it.
Accompanying the visuals is the rhythmic hum of the tattoo needle, along with an abstract soundscape.
This audio piece is a sonic exploration of memory as well, incorporating manipulated recollections of sounds from our time in Japan—temple bells, distant conversations, and the buzzing of urban life, all filtered
through layers of distortion and time.

3 Esel, Sizilien
2022, Book Design

Books are a symbol of structure and order. But what happens when a book consists of 95 percent footnotes? In this work, Jan Wagner’s poem disappears into an absurd profusion of notes that challenge the reader not to get lost in curious facts and comments. Not only is the poem peppered with footnotes, but the footnotes themselves also have their own notes, and so on. The footnote, a tool of organization, becomes the very embodiment of chaos. Just as for the protagonists of the poem, it becomes impossible for the reader to reach the destination—whether it is the donkeys in the distance or their story, which fades away behind mountains of endless information. In the end, the question remains: who is superior, humans or donkeys?

Artistic Research