GLITCH BOX:
AN OPEN-SOURCE COLLABORATIVE AI PROTOCOL
SXSW
LONDON, 2025
WEB OF HUMANS
LoRAs by Marco Conti & Rob Woodcox
The GLITCHBOX is a revolutionary open-source tool that transforms human expression—voice, movement, and sound—into living, responsive visual environments in real-time. Its aim is to demonstrate a new paradigm for human-AI collaboration: not AI as replacement or mimicry, but as creative partner, responding instantly to human presence to generate unique audiovisual experiences that could never exist without this synthesis. Visitors become co-creators, their voices and gestures triggering cascades of generative visuals that reflect and amplify human creativity through machine intelligence. The GlitchBox represents the democratization of AI art-making—a tool designed to be accessible, modifiable, and forever evolving through community contribution.
The GlitchBox was created by Primavera De Filippi, Apolinario Passos, Marco Conti Šikić, and Giulio Trichilo (members of the Glitch Collective) in partnership with Hugging Face, Alien Intelligence, and 204.ai, commissioned by SXSW London, curated by Alex Poots and produced by North Star Studio.
How It Works
The GlitchBox is built on powerful open-source AI technology that puts creative control directly into artists' hands. At its core, it's a real-time visual generation system that transforms human expression into stunning, ever-changing digital art.
Real-Time Creative Translation
The system captures your movements through motion tracking and converts your voice and music into dynamic visual landscapes. Whether you're dancing, speaking, singing, or playing music, the GlitchBox responds instantly—creating unique visuals that pulse, flow, and evolve with every gesture and sound.
Open Source Foundation
What makes the GlitchBox truly revolutionary is its commitment to open-source principles. Artists don't need expensive proprietary software or technical expertise to create professional-grade AI art. The entire system is built on freely available tools and can be modified, improved, and shared by the community.
Accessible AI Art Creation
Traditional AI art tools often require coding knowledge or complex setups. The GlitchBox breaks down these barriers, offering an intuitive interface where your body becomes the controller and your voice becomes the brush. Artists can focus on what they do best—creating and expressing—while the AI handles the technical complexity of real-time visual generation.
A Growing Creative Ecosystem
Because it's open source, the GlitchBox continues to evolve through community contributions. Artists, developers, and creators worldwide can add new features, visual styles, and interaction methods, ensuring the tool grows with the needs of its users. This collaborative approach represents a new model for creative technology—one where artists shape the tools rather than being limited by them.
The result is a democratized creative platform that empowers any artist to explore the intersection of human expression and machine intelligence, creating art that neither could produce alone.
PARTYING ON THE MOON
LoRAs created based on the works of George Melies
Protocol Art in Practice
The GlitchBox represents a living example of Protocolism—an emerging artistic movement that redefines how we think about authorship and collaboration in the digital age. In this new paradigm, artists don't just create individual works; they create "artistic protocols"—sets of creative instructions and constraints that others can execute and build upon.
Asynchronous Creative Collaboration
When artists contribute their work to the GlitchBox, they're not simply sharing finished pieces. They're offering their creative DNA—their distinctive styles, approaches, and artistic essence—as protocols that other artists can use to augment their own work. This creates a unique form of asynchronous collaboration where artists separated by time and space can still co-create together.
An artist might contribute their movement patterns, another their vocal techniques, and yet another their visual style. Future users of the GlitchBox can then blend these elements, creating works that bear the creative fingerprints of multiple contributors while adding their own unique expression. The result is neither derivative nor imitative, but genuinely collaborative—a new work that emerges from the synthesis of human creativity and AI interpretation.
Beyond Traditional Authorship
This approach challenges conventional notions of artistic ownership. In the GlitchBox ecosystem, every performance becomes a collaboration between the live performer, the contributing protocol artists whose work informs the system, and the AI that interprets and synthesizes these inputs in real-time. Each artist maintains their creative identity while contributing to a larger, evolving artistic consciousness.
The GlitchBox demonstrates how AI can serve not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a medium for unprecedented forms of artistic collaboration—enabling artists to co-create across boundaries of time, space, and individual artistic practice.