Category: Video Art

Deep Paula

Posted on | by Erika
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2022, video with sound, 5:22 min, interaktive survey

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 if we think just a few steps into the future: thanks to artificial intelligence will it one day be possible to create a perfectly living, digital „me“ of a deceased person? We already leave countless traces on the internet in the form of search queries, purchases, posts from our lives – photos, videos, comments – and much more. Will this turn us into transparent puppets that ghost around the web forever? If the loss of a person is compensated for by a digital twin – what meaning will farewell, grief and pain 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).

Survey:

Would you consider bringing a photo of a deceased loved one to “life” using an AI application? Yes? / No?

to the survey
analogue real-time visualisation of the survey in the exhibition Uncanny Valley, New Gallery in the Höhmannhaus, Augsburg 2023

Conditio Humana II

Posted on | by Erika
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2022, video with sound, 4:50 min

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

Rabbit Hole 4.0

Posted on | by Erika
2020, 3D-Animation, 9:45 min

Suzanne is lured into a virtual dream world by flashing buttons and the voice assistant on her computer, which promise her a solution to her sleeping problem. In fact, however, she is only part of a large scientific experiment in which the aim is to specifically manipulate her behaviour.

More than one third of the world‘s population is part of the social networking community. Therefore these platforms play an increasing role as economic environments in the online world; and the attention of the user becomes a precious, but scarce resource. But the business model of gratuitious access to these communities hides a significant danger: surveillance and behavior modification by private enterprise companies, who develop powerful tools for manipulation. This new technology is called Attention Engineering. It is composed of interface design, gamification and deep learning, and it utilises psychological aspects of human behavior.

Learn more.

Conditio Humana I

Posted on | by Erika
2022, video with sound, 3:40 min

The conditio humana refers to the conditions or circumstances of being human in general. What makes a human being a human being? This question is explored here by an AI in a monologue. One often cited aspect is language, which distinguishes us from animals. But what is the conditio humana that distinguishes us from an artificial intelligence?

The starting point for this work was a report on the radio about a new milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. In 2019, researchers had succeeded for the first time in developing an AI that won in poker against five real professional players.

The special thing about poker is the complexity of strategy calculation, because – unlike in chess, for example – the information is incomplete (hidden hand) and the opponents act unpredictably (concealing one’s own hand and constantly changing strategy in response to opponents). At the same time, the AI must also deceive the opponent in order to win.
All in all, this demands special skills from the AI that catapult it to the next evolutionary level.

If an AI had its own consciousness, what would it do with this ability?

Dancer: Dominic Feistmantl

Premiere: Façade projection in Buenos Aires / Argentina on December 17 2022

Supermother

Posted on | by Erika
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2022, video with sound, animation, single or multichannel, 7:44 min

It sounds like the short form of mother, but this is Google’s new AI Multitask Unified Model – “MUM” for short – which has been consistently learning since 2021 what the intentions are behind our questions, no matter what language we speak. This enables it to answer even faster and more precisely. MUM knows what we want. We can ask her anything.

An organic something, similar to an eye, scans the surroundings like a surveillance camera. It is MUM. A surveillance monitor is reflected in her “eye”. It is footage of me and with me as a mother who accompanies her children with the camera – or better: monitors them? Are we similar?

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?

“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

Homunculus

Posted on | by Erika
2022, video with sound, animation, 6:34 min

The term homunculus (= Latin for “little man”) refers to an artificially created human being – and stands for mankind’s dream of being able to construct a being according to its own imagination, with the help of the latest technology. This idea has already been used in many literary works, for example in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Today, we are closer to this idea than ever before. In the age of Deep Learning, it is no longer alchemists or scientists, but programmers who teach artificial intelligences to generate human-like faces independently and deceptively real. Ingenious, scary or dangerous?

In this work we are confronted with a series of such artificial portraits. In a strange way, they communicate with us: their eyes seem to explore the space and their facial expressions change. Recognising faces and understanding non-verbal communication shapes us as a human species and as social beings. But how do we react when an AI tries to imitate precisely this ability? Does it want to deceive us? Communicate with us? Test us?

Memento

Posted on | by Erika
2016 / 2022, video with sound, animation, 5:00 min

The basis of this work are 25 photographs in long exposure, which were taken during a dance rehearsal. Like modules, they are rearranged and repeated by me. This creates an artificial, seemingly endless dance that no longer has anything to do with the original choreography.

Following the Baroque model, beauty and death are metaphorically juxtaposed here – a vanitas dance to the transience of life. Here, the flow of time or the passing of lifetime is embodied by water, whether through the acoustic, rhythmic dripping like the ticking of a clock, or visually through the artificially slowed flow of a river.

The video is accompanied by the excerpt The Burial of the Dead from the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922).

Dancer: Dominik Feistmantl

Phantom

Posted on | by Erika
2022, video with sound, animation, 2:51 min

A friend gave me this old album of her family. It touches me that she wanted to throw it away a long time ago. Because the people in the photos have no meaning for her, she says. But she hasn’t had the heart to do it yet. Doesn’t this prove that all our efforts for a little immortality are in vain?

Now I hold it in my hands and wonder, if someone could tell the stories of these people, would these memories be true? They would be remembered stories or told memories of stories of memories….

Science has taught us that the subconscious manipulates memory to make it useful to us. But if memory is distorted more and more from person to person, what comes out in the end? Would these stories therefore only be uncontrollable mirages of an inner archaic power?

“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)

Brother of Sleep

Posted on | by Erika
2022, video with sound, animation, 3:00 min

“Because one thing is stronger than us, and that is the eternal progression of time, which never stops and inevitably leads to death.”

Christian Boltanski

Four faceless dancers perform a ghostly, seemingly endlessly repeating dance. As in a baroque painting, beauty and death (= the brother of sleep) are juxtaposed here in an aestheticizing manner in one composition – a memento mori – underpinned by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Kreuzstabkantate “Komm o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder” (Come, O death, thou brother of sleep). The butterfly as a baroque metaphor combines both in an impressive way: Beauty, transience, death and resurrection.

The basis of this work are 12 photographs in long exposure. Their constructed sequence in rapid succession creates an artificial choreography that becomes increasingly distorted.

Wailing Song

Posted on | by Erika
2022, Animation, 7:28 min

Countless small will-o’-the-wisps buzz in this artificial underwater world. They symbolise all the people who drowned between 2014 and 2022 on their flight to Europe. At the bottom of this sea, we listen to the stories of five young refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Gambia. They talk about their families, their flight from violence, their hopes and dreams.

The audio material was made available with the kind permission of the Junges Theater Augsburg.