In an undefined space and timeless state, we circle around two faceless avatars from changing perspectives. Who – or what – are they? Projections of real people, intelligent machines, or something in between? Can machines develop desires, dreams? A golden apple floats between them, its reflective surface expanding the real space. All their efforts revolve around the golden apple – and yet it remains out of reach.
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).
2025, Video with sound, trailer 1:59 min
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 return of the seasons or the collective murmuring of a rosary.
Following on from the romantic landscapes of the 19th century, this video cycle in 4 parts shows landscapes of the 21st century, oscillating between real and artificial.
Spring, 3:21 min — Spring is dawning, but nature has not yet awoken – bare trees pass by. Here and there a car. Memories echo in the distance.
Autumn, 3:11 min — Rain pattering on a window. The landscape behind it seems strangely alive. Is it breathing? Is it raging? A harbinger of imminent death – in winter!
Summer, 4:24 min — A sandstorm bathes the passing landscape in warm yellow. Beautiful and terrible. Terribly beautiful.
Winter, 10 min — “Home” passes by. Will it come again? The monotonous rolling noise on the old railroad tracks makes you sleepy, and a white oblivion covers your thoughts.
Is this a bedtime story? Hardly. The starting point in “Sleep well, my Love” is an old family photo album. With the help of artificial intelligence, the photos in it come to life in an uncanny way. Over these disturbing images, a child whispers “The Willful Child” by the Brothers Grimm – a fairy tale about a mother who literally beats her child into the grave out of love because it is disobedient beyond death.
“Mother” stands for care. But what makes a “good” mother? Although we like to believe that there are universal truths, the concept of motherhood is profoundly shaped by changing social norms and cultural expectations.
Inspired by the photo albums and the fairy tale, this experimental short film questions idealized notions of motherhood. What begins as a nostalgic exploration becomes a disturbing reflection on memory, identity and the narratives we inherit.
UT: German, English, French, Romanian
Language: German
“We all carry a dead child within us.“ Christian Boldtanski quotes Tadeusz Kantor
We move through an abandoned house. The rooms bear witness to the fact that people once lived here. Reality and fiction, present and past merge together. 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: “Class of 1911.” Who were these people? Does anyone still remember them? I lend them my eyes and bring them back to life post mortem – an artificial liveliness.
The video work ties in with a tradition that is largely forgotten today: post-mortem photography. In this practice, the recently deceased were photographed, either alone as a portrait or together with relatives, arranged as if they were still alive. These images served not only as a memento, but also as an attempt to halt the moment of disappearance.
Sitting among these children, I act as a link between yesterday and today and think aloud about the fear of disappearing. By inscribing myself into the historical class photo, I transfer the tradition of post-mortem photography into a contemporary, digital visual language. The work reveals how images – then as now – are used to outwit transience: they preserve presence, create a deceptive liveliness, and shift the moment of farewell into a timeless in-between.
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?
Based on the work Conditio Humana I, the question of what the conditio humana is is continued here. If we consider the highest art form of human movement – dance – it is a combination of absolute body control, elegance and emotionality. This is contrasted here with a “dance” by the humanoid robot HRP-4C, as it was presented to the world public in 2010.
Dancer: Dominik Feistmantl
Suzanne is lured into a seductive virtual dream – guided by flashing buttons and a calming voice assistant promising relief from insomnia. Unbeknownst to her, she is part of a behavioral experiment designed to manipulate her actions through algorithmic control.
The film rejects traditional narrative in favor of a fragmented, immersive loop that mirrors the disorienting logic of digital platforms – addictive, cyclical, and subtly coercive.
Social networks now shape a global economy in which attention is the most valuable resource. What appears to be free access conceals a deeper cost: constant surveillance and behavioral conditioning by tech corporations using Attention Engineering – a system that combines persuasive design, gamification, and AI, grounded in psychology.
Rabbit Hole 4.0 explores the loss of personal agency in a world where algorithms anticipate needs before we are aware of them. It reflects on the illusion of choice, the commodification of behavior, and the quiet erosion of self-determination in an era of total digital recall.
At its core, the film poses a simple but urgent question: in a world shaped by invisible influences, do we still have control over ourselves?
The conditio humana refers to the conditions or circumstances of being human in general, usually in contrast to animals. What makes a person human? Is it language? Is it the imagination? What is the conditio humana in relation to artificial intelligence? In a monologue, I let a (fictitious) AI discuss this here.
The starting point for this work was a report on a new milestone in the development of artificial intelligence: In 2019, researchers succeeded for the first time in developing an AI that won a poker game against five real professional players. All in all, this requires special skills that catapult artificial intelligence to the next level of evolution.
Is an AI the better human in the end?
Dancer: Dominic Feistmantl
Premiere: Façade projection in Buenos Aires / Argentina on December 17 2022
2022, video with sound, animation, 6:34 min
Humans have always dreamed of creating artificial life. The homunculus – the “little man” – originating in the late Middle Ages, symbolizes this desire and, at the same time, the ambivalence of technological progress, which rarely ended well in literature and myth. For a long time, creativity, morality, and the understanding of contexts were considered exclusively human abilities, based on the unique complexity of the brain.
With the latest developments in artificial intelligence, especially in deep learning, this self-image is beginning to falter. Since 2020, deceptively real AI-generated portraits have shown how machines can independently create human faces—faces of people who never existed. Today, the modern homunculus is no longer created in the laboratory, but in code: a product of data, algorithms, and neural networks that fascinates, unsettles, and raises the question of what the next step in this artificial creation will be.
“Homunculus” is a study of human facial expressions based on AI-generated portraits from 2022. At that time, the technology was still in its infancy. The work combines artistic exploration and technological observation, while also serving as an early testimony to the era of AI image generators.
