TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

The paper introduces the interactive installation 'TAMATA / An ode to broken bodies,' which addresses the issue of gender-based violence. The installation comprises of a tangible interface made of metallic plaques used as traditional religious votive offerings. These offerings —known as 'tamata' in the Greek Orthodox religious tradition — typically feature embossed images of bodily parts that the offerer desires to be cured.

The installation consists of a composition of such votive offerings that represent bodily parts, giving the impression of a deconstructed and fragmented body. When the visitor touches the installation’s votive offerings, they trigger audio poems related to recent gender-based violent incidents. The poems were created by the author with an AI text-to-text algorithm.

More concretely, the AI algorithm is fed with open data from an online observatory of gender violence. The observatory gathers data related to violent incidents, such as the geographical coordinates, date, and a short description. The descriptions of some selected incidents are used as input to a large language model (LLM), which generates poems inspired by them, using as reference the work of female poets.

The metallic plaques serve as an interactive interface. They are connected to an electronic microcontroller and are used as capacitive electrodes, which detect human touch. Whenever the visitors touch one of the plaques, the microcontroller activates a synthetic AI female voice reciting one of the generated poems.

The paper summarizes official reports on gender-based violence, examines related artistic works, and it describes the artwork 'TAMATA / An ode to broken bodies.' More concretely, it provides information about the concept of the artwork, its design, and technical implementation, describing the process of generating AI poetry and building the installation’s interactive interface.