A real existing space runs through a “what-if” of infinite possibilities, thought up by me, visualised by an artificial intelligence. This work was produced for the event “…WILL BE EATEN BY THE RAVENS” at the Stadttheater Neuburg a.d.Donau (16.06.2024). This video was accompanied by a live performance of the piece Nocturne by Lili Boulanger (for flute and harp).
Following on from the 19th century Romantic landscape, this video cycle in 4 parts shows landscape as a reflection of an inner state. Perception as a seismograph of one’s own mood – very personal, flawed, and always oscillating between reality and fiction, between observation and thought.
Forces of nature mingle with landmarks of civilization and do not depict glorified places of longing. In the frenzy of speed, the moment evaporates and yet always returns – like the seasons.
All the videos are looped – without beginning or end, and seemingly endless – like the collective murmuring of a rosary or the Lord’s Prayer.
Spring as a symbol of joie de vivre, as the Romantics saw it? Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”, a different impression emerges here:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. (…)
(from: T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land – I. The Burial of the Dead.”)
A sandstorm bathes the passing landscape in warm yellow. Beautiful or terrible? Terribly beautiful? Are these the harbingers of an apocalypse that we ourselves have caused?
Or a wondrous natural spectacle?
Are we on the run?
If so, where to?
Or is the land fleeing? From us?
Vilem Flusser (Czech-Brazilian media philosopher and communication scientist) comes to mind, who once stated that “rootedness” and “home” are “inventions” of our time – the Romantics were also inspired by this – when man has been a nomad for most of his evolutionary history…
Rain pattering on a window makes the landscape behind it seem strangely alive.
Is it breathing?
Is it raging, accompanied by thunder and lightning?
A harbinger of imminent death – in winter!
Landscape rushes by again (I can’t help thinking of Schubert’s “Winterreise”). This time it is the “homeland” that is traveling. Maybe it won’t come back?
The monotonous rolling noise on the old railroad sleepers sounds like an echo from the past.
The apple was and is highly symbolic in many cultures: be it as a symbol of eternal youth, eternal life, love, fertility, paradise and the fall of mankind.
In this installation, a golden apple floats in the air like a fixed star. Familiar places are reflected on its shiny surface. How are people doing there and in the world?
In contrast, the two-dimensional portraits in this landscape appear strange. Who are these people? The Holy Family? Our neighbours? They never existed, but are the outputs of an artificial intelligence. We live in a time of upheaval. New technologies give us the feeling that we are increasingly losing control over truth and lies, over good and evil.
Is this paradise on earth?
The apple hides a secret inside, because there is a small star made up of 5 seeds. It reminds us that our actions determine whether we come a little closer to “paradise on earth”.
Site-specific installation.
Deep Paradise @ St.Konrad / Augsburg-Bärenkeller, 2023, video with sound, 6:07 min
The (golden) apple was and is highly symbolic in many cultures: be it as a symbol for eternal youth, eternal life, for love, fertility, paradise and the fall of man, and most recently as an “item” in the popular game Minecraft. The word “Avalon” has many meanings, but here it refers to the island of Avalon (Gallic-Indo-Germanic abal = apple) from Celtic mythology, which was regarded as paradise.
In an indeterminate room under a blue sky, we circle around two faceless avatars with a golden apple in the middle. Like in a surreal dream, we find ourselves in an endless loop in which the figures display a strange behaviour. Everything seems to revolve around this apple, which in the end remains out of reach for everyone.
1+2: Both videos show the same scene, but from different angles.
This video installation is modified site-specifically. The idea is that the virtual space shows the immediate exhibition environment.
“(…) It is difficult to define the spatial dimensions of memory. It is there, the room of my childhood, which I am still tidying and which is still dying, at the same time as its inhabitants, – their mortal shell.. (…)” Tadeusz Kantor
An abandoned house*. The rooms testify that people once lived here. There, reality and fiction, present and past merge with each other. As if in a nightmare, we rush through the rooms and are repeatedly confronted with an old class photo. On the back of the real photo is written: “Born in 1911”. Who were these people? Does anyone still remember them? I lend them my eyes and let them come alive again post mortem. An artificial liveliness – a lifeline against oblivion?
In the midst of these children I (Erika) sit as a link between yesterday and today and think aloud about the fear of disappearance – or can being forgotten also be a grace? The children’s song “When and where will we meet again and be glad?” must remain unanswered.
* This house is the “House of New Realities” – a temporary collective artwork at Bäckergasse 4 – a kind of pop-up museum, which was brought to life by Bluespots Productions in the summer of 2023 as part of the Augsburg Peace Festival. I modified the installation “Post Mortem” for this location. Thus, that one has now itself become a memorandum for those who once animated this place.
2023, video with sound, 3:15 min
The tempting offer of AI-supported applications is increasing. With their help, memory photos are brought “to life”.
Does this bring us closer to the person we remember? Or are we creating something else – something new? Something uncanny?
“Anna” really did exist once. A caption on the back of this photograph tells us that it was addressed to someone who was supposed to remember his “little friend Hela”.
Music: AI-generated
Sandbox is on the one hand a sandy playground for children, on the other hand a term originating from software development for an “isolated area within which any action has no effect on the external environment”. (Wikipedia)
We are sitting in a large virtual sandbox that is anything but isolated. There are many toys in it that we don’t know what they are for. And new ones are added every day. We explore them playfully and in the process we come up with ideas – good or bad….
One such toy is Dall-e 2, one of the most celebrated AIs of 2022, which can create realistic images and even artwork from a text-based description in natural language. This creative act is new and unique, and must be judged as the next stage of evolution.
The works Dall-e generates are almost perfect, and yet she generates strangely disturbing outputs in response to seemingly innocuous keywords. It begs the question, is this the toy we would give our children?
In this work, we are confronted with an old photo that has been “brought to life” with the help of artificial intelligence. Does the girl seem authentic? Do we feel closer to her? What becomes of faulty memory when it gives way to artificial vividness? Doesn’t this illusion rather contribute to forgetting the last remnants of the memory of the real person? And would “Paula” have liked what we do with her memory?
But let’s think just a few steps further: thanks to artificial intelligence, it is already possible today to create a perfect, seemingly “living”, digital “self”, as offered by companies such as Storyfile, Eternos.life. We leave countless traces on the internet in the form of search queries, purchases, contributions from our lives – photos, videos, comments – and much more. Will this turn us into transparent marionettes that ghost around the web forever? Who is pulling the strings in the background? Will we still be able to tell the difference between living and dead, human and artificial? And further: if the loss of a person is compensated for by a digital twin – what meaning will farewell, grief and pain still have?
Can you imagine that the memory of you exists forever on the net as a living digital twin?
Would you like to resurrect a deceased loved one as a digital copy?
Music: AI-generated
“Paula’s” real portrait photo can be found in the work Below the Surface (Book Object).
Would you consider bringing a photo of a deceased loved one to “life” using an AI application? Yes? / No?
Following on from the work Conditio Humana I, the question of what the conditio humana is is continued here. Another aspect, in my opinion, is the ability of absolute body control. As distinct from artificial intelligence, it is physicality in combination with emotion and elegance.
In this work, complex human movements in the form of a dance are contrasted with the humanoid robot HRP-4C, as it was presented to the world public in 2010.
Dancer: Dominik Feistmantl
It sounds like the short form of mum, but this is Google’s new AI Multitask Unified Model – “MUM” for short – which has been consistently learning the intentions behind our questions since 2021, no matter what language we speak. This enables it to answer even faster and more precisely. MUM knows what we want. We can ask it anything. With every search query, MUM learns to understand us better. Will she soon know more about us than we know about ourselves? What is she? Mother or monster?
An organic something, similar to an eye, scans the environment like a surveillance camera. It is MUM. It watches over us. A person working on a sewing machine can be seen from different angles on 3 monitors.
The recordings were made during a work-in-progress as part of the co-operation project “About the spatial dimension of skinning“. They show the sculptor Esther Irina Pschibul sewing a “protective skin” from dried pig bladders.
“Secretly, we are all just looking for a higher authority.
Someone to tell us what the hell to do.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Update für die Übermutter vom 29.8.2021
