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).
2024, 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.
UT: German, English, French, Romanian
Language: German
This work refers to the island of Avalon (Gallo-Indo-Germanic abal = apple) from Celtic mythology, which was regarded as “paradise”.
In an undefined space and unknown time, we circle around two faceless avatars with a golden apple in the middle. All striving seems to be directed towards this apple, which nevertheless remains out of reach for everyone in the end.
“We all carry a dead child within us.“ Christian Boldtanski quotes Tadeusz Kantor
An abandoned house*. The rooms bear witness to the fact that people once lived here. Reality and fiction, present and past merge here. We wander through the rooms like in a nightmare and are repeatedly confronted with an old class photo. On the back of the real-life 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.
I (Erika) sit in the middle of these children as a link between yesterday and today and think aloud about the fear of disappearing.
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
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.
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
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 and with the help of the latest technology. In literature, this idea has already been processed in many ways, for example in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Today, we are closer to this dream than ever before, but in the age of deep learning, it is neither alchemists nor scientists, but programmers who teach artificial intelligence to generate human-like faces independently and deceptively realistically. Ingenious, scary or dangerous?
