Category: Spatial Installation

Entity Dreams Body

Posted on | by Erika
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Entity Body Simulation Boundaries
Entity dreams body, 2025, room installation with 2 videos, tv sculpture, 10 polaroids (2025 / 2015 / 2011). Simulation.

In Entity Dreams Body, the boundaries between life and simulation are explored: A breathing skin balloon rises and falls, next to it a child’s toy whose lifelike eyes return the gaze. Human fragments, technology, and toys merge into a hybrid being – familiar and eerie at the same time.

The work negotiates the boundaries between humans and machines, between what is technically feasible and what is ethically acceptable. Prostheses and enhancements do not appear as progress, but as unsettling transformations that alienate humanity. Instead of envisioning harmonious coexistence, the installation reveals the ambivalence and unease of a possible future: Where does the synthetic begin to transform the human? And how can a balance between humanity and alienation still be conceived in a world of permanent enhancement?

Hybrid Reality

This idea is embodied in ten Polaroids showing a toy – strikingly similar to the hybrid creature – in the hands of a child. The photographs are based on documentary material and bear the traces of a real past.

From another corner of the room, a voice muses on “posthumanism.” A tower of pedestals rises before the viewer, topped by a small CRT television that serves as a “head.” On its screen, the digitally reconstructed face of a child appears, created from archival material. Meanwhile, the voice and accompanying text are generated by artificial intelligence.

The work combines memory and technological simulation and condenses questions about identity, reproduction, and the role of humans in the posthuman age.

Music: Rasmus Kassnel-Henneberg

A New Humanism in the Digital Transformation

At the center of Kassnel-Henneberg’s work is the question of a new humanism. It focuses on the role of humans in a digital world. She explores how artificial intelligence, algorithms, and digital systems are changing what it means to be human. At the same time, she critically asks whether humans can still act autonomously when technological processes influence or even replace decisions.

Her works open a discourse on the relationship between biological existence and technological expansion. This theme runs through her entire Time-Based Media Art portfolio. It shows how technology deeply shapes human perception and identity.

Cross-Media Practice Between Analog and Digital

Kassnel-Henneberg understands her artistic practice as a bridge connecting analog and digital worlds. Therefore, she works across multiple media, including:

  • Video
  • CGI (Computer Generated Imagery)
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Polaroid Photography
  • Collage and Mixed Media

Through this combination, she creates works that exist between reality and simulation, and between documentation and construction. The audience is invited to critically reflect on their perception, which is increasingly shaped by media. At the same time, the use of analog techniques creates a compelling dialogue between past and present.

Education and Interdisciplinary Foundations

Her artistic development is based on an interdisciplinary education. First, she studied restoration at the Bern University of the Arts. There, she learned technical skills and developed a deep understanding of materiality, history, and cultural heritage. She then studied Interactive Media at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences.

This combination of conservation knowledge and digital media expertise forms the foundation of her Time-Based Media Art portfolio. It allows her to connect traditional and modern techniques effectively.

Exhibitions, Festivals, and International Recognition

Kassnel-Henneberg’s works have been presented nationally and internationally. A highlight is her solo exhibition “Uncanny Valley” at the Neue Galerie in the Höhmannhaus of the Augsburg Municipal Art Collections. The exhibition addressed the uncanny feeling that arises when artificial systems increasingly resemble humans.

Additionally, she has participated several times in the FILE – Electronic Language International Festival in São Paulo. This festival is one of the world’s leading platforms for digital and time-based media art. It underscores the international relevance of her work.

Awards and Artistic Recognition

  • 2013: Krumbach Art Prize for the book object “Heimat ist anderswo”
  • 2022: Augsburg District Art Prize for her overall body of work

These awards recognize not only her ongoing engagement with identity, memory, and social change. They also demonstrate the significance of her Time-Based Media Art portfolio in contemporary art.

Teaching, Jury Work, and Media Culture

In addition to her artistic practice, Kassnel-Henneberg works as a lecturer. She teaches at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences and various private art academies. Moreover, she actively participates in juries and supports emerging positions in media art.

Her teaching and curatorial work complements her artistic practice. It also strengthens the discourse around time-based media art in Germany.

Conclusion: Time-Based Media Art as Societal Reflection

Erika Kassnel-Henneberg’s work exemplifies contemporary art that combines aesthetic innovation with social relevance. Her Time-Based Media Art portfolio invites reflection on humanism, technology, and identity in a connected world. At the same time, it shows how art can provide guidance and critical reflection in a complex digital reality. https://eri-kassnel.de/sichtbar-verknuepft-frei/ https://gedok-muc.de/

Perpetuum Mobile

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Spatial installation, 76th Great Swabian Art Exhibition, Hall 1 – Room for Art in the Glaspalast, Augsburg, 2024

This video shows a corridor-like space with no doors or windows. A pendulum with a light bulb swings like a clockwork between the sides of the room, creating a mechanical rhythm of light and darkness. In this alternation, wall surfaces become visible, covered with fragments of memory: a floral wallpaper, a devotional image, a stuffed deer head, and cryptic formulas that denote “eternity” and “remembering” as variable states. At first, these elements seem familiar and biographically rooted.

With the repetition of the pendulum’s swing, this legibility shifts. The scene loses its intimacy and tips into a condensed, claustrophobic structure. The room appears less as a place than as a system of repetition and feedback, in which personal and historical traces are no longer separable.

The space thus becomes a repository without hierarchy, in which memory is not archived but continuously reconstructed. What appears as biographical material dissolves into an abstract logic of recurrence.

This logic continues in the transition to the physical installation. Objects from the video reappear in real space, dissolving the boundary between virtual and physical space. A devotional image of the Christ Child feeding doves and ceramic animal skulls reflect the motifs shown. Individual objects reappear on Polaroids on the wall, including the stuffed deer head. Through this repeated translation between media, things circulate between reality, image, and meaning. Documentation, staging, and ideology become indistinguishable. The space appears both real and constructed – as a symbol of a present in which historical relics, political narratives, and media repetitions create an experience of permanent recurrence.

Deep Paradise

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Deep Paradise @ St.Konrad / Augsburg-Bärenkeller, 2023, video installation with sound, 6:07 min

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 (in the Bärenkeller district of Augsburg). 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”.

The site-specific video installation refers to the real space: church, district, city… by showing it as a digital mirror image, which in turn is reflected by the shiny surface of the golden apple. A kind of visual recursion in which reality and fiction, analog and digital merge.

Deep Paula

Posted on | by Erika
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2023, video with sound, 5:22 min, analog survey with Lego(R) bricks

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 liveliness? Isn’t this illusion more likely to help us forget the last remnants of our memory of the real person? And would “Paula” have liked what we do with her memory?

Thanks to artificial intelligence, it is already possible today to create a perfect, seemingly “living” digital self, as promised by companies such as Storyfile and 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?

“Paula’s” real portrait photo can be found in the work Below the Surface (Book Object).

Music: AI-generated

Would you like to resurrect a deceased loved one as a digital copy? You can vote yes or no and take part in my analogue survey with real-time visualisation (Lego(R) bricks) or vote digitally here:

to the survey

Phantom

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2022, video with sound, animation, 2:51 min

“People take photos of each other
To prove that they really existed
To make sure they are there
People take photos of each other
Believing that those moments
Would stay alive for all time”

Excerpt from: Menschen Machen Fotos gegenseitig, Die goldenen Zitronen (Songtext)

Letters from Utopia

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2012, Selection from a total of 52 parts, about 30 x 20 cm each

The letter is a relic today. Until recently, it was the most important medium of communication between people in distant places. It expresses the synchronicity of physical distance and inner closeness. It is emotionally loaded – why else was it lovingly stored in shoe boxes or torn up in anger? The letters here are metaphorical bridges to a place of longing that exists only in memory – a very personal utopia.

This work took part in the X-Border-Art Biennial in Rovaniemi / Finland and in the Open Art Biennial in Örebro /Sweden. Virtual tour.

Drum Bun Spacial Installation

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Drum Bun, 7-part work, collage, SanDepot-Halle, Aichach 2014

The room installation shows 7 processed sheets of paper hanging from the ceiling by a thread. Every breeze created by a passing visitor causes the sheets of paper to rotate, so that they cannot always be seen in their entirety. The result is an overall picture that is fragmentary and constantly changing – just like a memory.

Atlantis!

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Installation, 8 parts, 2013, photography, glass, oil, wax on metal console, 93 x 15 x 12 cm

Man is a being driven by longing. The search for Atlantis – the mythical island empire sung about by Plato that sank into the sea – is the look back, the search for the memory of all the vanished utopias, symbolised by eight “preserves”.