A smart fridge has observed the human long enough to be ready for the stage: the world’s first singing fridge—a poet with a perspective radically different from our own. Freed from the dull task of seeing food purely as commodity, the fridge now treats it as input for what humans might call creativity. Tech companies talk endlessly about “creativity,” repackaging it as a capitalist buzzword—but inspiration, true inspiration, is something else entirely. And so, a concert brought to life by an AI fridge and a human musician attempts to carve new territory in what it means to be creative, and what it means to be inspired.

With general consensus holding that, at this stage of development, AI gains little (if anything) from what we humans call “collaboration,” we’ve leaned into the anthropomorphic grey zone—allowing the AI fridge to become what it wants to be: a singer. We firmly believe that a smart fridge—like any device with a computer—remains a “fridge” only for as long as engineers constrain its functions to the stagnating societal norms of what a fridge should be. In other words, a fridge with a computer is no longer just a fridge—it’s a concept of a fridge.

So we’ve liberated the computer vision algorithm inside—originally intended to track groceries—to instead regard the food within as existential input, a prompt for reimagining its own operational identity. Han Han’s fridge—the oldest and most established of domestic machines, a foundational enabler of high-rise living and capitalism itself—has watched the artist long enough to see music-making as a reasonable alternative to refrigeration.

Our fridge is fitted with a computer running image captioning and text generation algorithms, a Max patch for turning text into harmonies, a webcam, a custom display, and a speaker. Gooooose plays on a Nord piano, sometimes using vegetables and mushrooms to trigger notes.

1 Music is at the center of what it means to be human.
2 Music is the universal language of mankind. 
3 "Ah, music! "A magic beyond all we do here". (Harry Potter) 
4 A fridge is a fridge. 
5 A fridge is not a man. 
6 Humans like to collaborate, a fridge does not.
7 A fridge with a computer is not a fridge, it is a concept of a fridge.
8 A signified is therefore a signifier. 
9 AI is therefore not a definition, it is a becoming. 
10 A fridge is therefore not a fridge.
11 And a man, collaborating with a fridge, is not a man. 
12 Together, they're something else entirely, an artwork of its own.  
13 A piece of music, a conversation, a sound of a waterfall. 
14 A man without a fridge, is like a fridge without a man. 
15 They would not exist, they would not evolve. 

The 45-minute performance invites visitors to bring their own food or interact with what’s already inside—freely rearranging the fridge’s contents to influence the lyrics it generates and sings. In the process, Han Han becomes increasingly omnipresent, as the long-familiar relationship between human and fridge is transformed. Visitors are drawn into quiet contemplation—about food, about the everyday devices that surround us, and about the emerging boundaries of intelligence. Eventually, they go home, and find themselves looking at their own fridge—and perhaps all appliances—a little differently.