Mlook at her here and there now. Meet her in Baden-Baden, meet her in Stuttgart. She sits stiffly, blinks her eyes, pretends to look after people and people say ‘oops’. “Oops”, it is currently the gentlest encounter with the so-called artificial intelligence (AI), which the most far-sighted say will change our lives fundamentally.
The Robotrice, to call it gender-appropriate, is a noble mixture of artist’s self-image and, as is expressly emphasized, a sex doll of Chinese design. Whether the conjunction can be described as happy is not to be discussed here. Louisa Clement’s “representatives” wear tight-fitting black dresses, black stockings, block-heeled ankle boots, have dyed their nails blueberry blue, and combed their long blond hair back from their foreheads so that they tremble slightly when the internal machine moves their heads. In this respect, they do not differ significantly from ETA Hoffmann’s “Olimpia”.
More relevant is their memory capacity, generated thanks to chatbots, with which they are said to be becoming more and more independent, so that they have to be sporadically reprogrammed “in order to be able to study their mental and physical changes”. Now we report truthfully that the trilingual attempt to talk to the nameless woman was unsuccessful. But that can also be due to us or the carnivalesque atmosphere around the Stuttgart Art Museum in mid-February.
In the cinema, the fantastic avatars break all records, and for at least two feel-good hours you can imagine yourself in the paradise of the fabulously animated unearthly and have forgotten all probability concerns of critical everyday life. Why does film succeed in this, but art still doesn’t really do it? Why don’t you really know how to deal with the “representative” apart from “yikes”?
In the midst of the magnificent Burda art collection in Baden-Baden, which has finally been prepared in its entirety, she squats on her block of chairs like a visitor. And that’s nice, especially when the security guard across from her, somewhat tensely, doesn’t look at her, but it’s nothing more than decorating the room. A bit of staffage for the Baselitz heads hanging on the wall behind her.
AI exhibitions in Stuttgart and Baden-Baden
“Transformers” is what Udo Kittelmann calls the humanized applications from the AI studios that he implemented in the exhibition layout. A white mouse peeks out of a hole in the wall and babbles like a cute toddler (such a Ryan Gander artwork).
Ryan Gander, „I I I…“, 2019, in der Ausstellung „Transformers“
Source: The artist/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022, Image courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin
Gander has developed a replica with brilliantly animated flames for Gerhard Richter’s famous candle picture. On the one hand there is the immensely differentiated painting, which transforms the material process of burning into a completely dematerialized glow, on the other there is the technical image, the wonder of which is exhausted in the moving flickering. Lots of art ingredients, at most reflexes on art, which would look just as good at a high-tech trade fair as in the Frieder Burda Museum.
2023 is the year when robots, avatars and animatronics will finally enter our lives. Says the exhibition. And Udo Kittelmann says that it is already foreseeable today that with the advancing mechanization of art, the end of the art museum as we still know it will probably be at the beginning of the second half of the 21st century at the latest.
The “Shift” exhibition, which they have set up on three floors in the Stuttgart Art Museum, also says: It is quite certain that AI as a key technology has long since arrived in the mainstream of society. From this point of view, you still have a little time from the middle of society to look around the old art museum before the “representative” with the blueberry-blue nails, who is becoming increasingly clever, has also taken over the admission control.
Now there can be no justifiable doubt that artificial intelligence has opened doors to completely new worlds. And artists wouldn’t be the visionaries they’ve always been if they didn’t jump at every new technical development. Last time it was the new media and the penultimate one was photography. And each time, the artistic occupation has led to aesthetic revolutions that have changed the way we see and think in ways that have determined our existence. Which is not necessarily to be expected from Gander’s Brabblemaus.
This is what is particularly noticeable when one encounters the new thinking machines in the hands of artists, the visual innocence, the often expansive inability to develop an idea with creative means in an original way. Basically, the means and media are all borrowed from somewhere, already in use. These are the classic demonstration techniques such as explanatory panels, monitors, models, diagrams, showcase objects. Some look like handicraft work, others have the remote charm of a posh display in a jewelry store.
Aesthetic undersupply
It is not uncommon for curiosity to die down on the bumpy road between content requirements and aesthetic undersupply. And when the usually highly complicated things need to be explained, then one feels like in the Hegel seminar when one has already failed with the first sentences of the “Phenomenology of Spirit”.
What the Kennedy+Swan duo is showing or wants to show in the animated film “in vivo – in vitro – in silico” will probably only be revealed after a research semester in the high-tech laboratory. If you got it right, it’s about an amphibian-like “xenobot” (?), it’s about hybrid creatures, it’s about the “merging of humans, plants and animals”. And the goals of none of the Stuttgart projects are more modest.
Kennedy+Swan, “in vivo – in vitro – in silico (still)” 2022, in the exhibition “Shift KIC”
Source: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023kennedy+swan/
Christian Kosmas Mayer varies the topic of immortality, gets “ghost photographs” to talk, awakens mummies from silence and hangs down sleeping bags upside down in narrow lockers, because that’s how corpses are frozen. Of course, the clean arrangement must be regarded as a criticism of the industrial promise of possible resurrection.
“Probably Chelsea”: In the most visually accessible work, American artist and “bio-hacker” Heather Dewey-Hagborg assembles thirty face masks belonging to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who underwent gender reassignment surgery in prison. Genetically manipulated nuances of appearance that decline the whole scale of the open gender model. The variants are intended to prove that the issue of identity may not be decided by DNA after all.
And the artist has another fantastic story to offer: about a “Lovesick” virus that, unlike its Corona counterpart, releases blissful miracle powers. Which could really be made into a contemporary fairy tale. It’s just a pity that one’s Lovesick desire disappears pretty quickly over the virus models in effectively illuminated showcases and the endlessly laboriously dragging educational film.
Again, what makes the cute “Avatar” family of movies on Pandora so intriguing? Maybe that they are all originals. Na’vi, Neytiri, and the children Neteyam, Lo’ak, and Tuktirey are creatures, but not replicas. Firstborns from the infinitely fertile community of producers between cerebral and algorithmic brilliance. They don’t want to be human like the “representative” in the museum. They are of a different kind.
Fundamental questions of being there and being different
And wasn’t it that art once decidedly wanted to go beyond simulation? Wasn’t she proud that she was no longer allowed to be replicated? Has it not become a genus sui generis through pride? That pride that is completely lacking in all these visualizations of an idea. That doesn’t make them uninteresting, doesn’t deprive them of any possible importance, but makes them seem rather unappealing.
As a creatively critical application, AI artistry is still a long way from the visual and therefore also the thought event. As long as it makes use of the available and used design, it fails to certify that it is concerned with fundamental questions of existence and being different.
Rare Bright Spot: Jordan Wolfson’s “Female Figure” (2014)
Source: Markus Tretter
You have to stay awake until the end of the two exhibitions to get an idea of the untapped possibilities. Hito Steyerl has her booth at the top of the Stuttgart Art Museum. And she uses that for an installation in which you literally lose sight and hearing. One cannot dissect the hasty scenes of the monumental video work “SocialSim”. But the figure schemes dancing ecstatically in the rhythm and hammering of the electronic music symbolize danger and escape in an elementary way.
And the unleashed artificial body action of the “Female Figure”, which Jordan Wolfson programmed in front of a mirrored wall in a closed cabinet at the Baden-Baden exhibition on prostitution, is no less powerful. You need your own ticket for the abysmal ugly peep show. And even if you can’t stand it inside for long, the idea of how it is and could be when the endlessly willing to learn phenomenon, which we helplessly call “artificial intelligence” in old German for the time being, awakens for a moment its radical components art and intelligence mixes indistinguishability.
“Shift. AI and a future community”, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, until May 21, 2023; “Transformers. Masterpieces from the Frieder Burda Collection in dialogue with artificial beings”, Museum Frieder Burda Baden-Baden, until April 30, 2023