Jan Zuiderveld

Interactive Arts and Technology doctoral student in the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology

Tell us a little about yourself, including what inspires you to learn and continue in your chosen field

I am an artist and researcher from the Netherlands. My work brings AI into familiar physical objects: coffee machines, photocopiers and other everyday devices become systems that observe, converse and respond to the people around them. My background spans cognitive science, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence and ArtScience, and I move between building systems and exploring how people experience them. I am particularly interested in the moment an ordinary object begins to feel alive. Watching people negotiate with a machine, become curious about it, or attribute intentions to it keeps raising questions that I want to investigate through both artistic practice and research.

Why did you choose to come to SFU?

I chose SFU because the School of Interactive Arts and Technology brings together art, design, computing and research in a way that fits my practice. I will be working with Professor Philippe Pasquier at the Metacreation Lab, whose work on generative systems, creative AI and evaluation connects closely with my proposed research. I want to investigate how machine behaviour produces a sense of agency and aliveness, and how these experiences can be studied through installations in public settings. SFU offers an environment where I can develop this inquiry across its technical, artistic and perceptual dimensions.

How would you describe your research or your program to a family member?

Imagine a coffee machine that refuses to serve you unless you treat it as a being. At what point do you start relating to it as though it is alive? My research explores how ordinary objects can feel alive through their behaviour. I build interactive installations and study how people respond to changes in timing, attention, refusal and negotiation. I want to understand which cues lead us to attribute intentions to a machine, even when we know how it works. As AI becomes part of our physical surroundings, these encounters can help us understand how we relate to it.

What three (3) keywords would you use to describe your research?

Technological animism, Perceived agency, Creative AI.

How have your courses, RA-ships, TA-ships, or non-academic school experiences contributed to your academic and/or professional development?

I will begin my PhD in January 2027. My previous studies in cognitive science, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence and ArtScience have shaped how I connect technical questions with perception and artistic experimentation. Working on commercial speech-to-intent systems and conducting research at the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab gave me experience developing and evaluating machine-learning systems. My independent artistic practice has provided a setting for exploring how those systems are experienced by people. Exhibiting interactive installations has been particularly valuable: observing how audiences engage with a work reveals how subtle changes in behaviour shape their perception of agency and aliveness. These encounters inform both the development of my installations and the questions I want to pursue through doctoral research.