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
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
2016 / 2022,
Video with sound, animation, 5:08 min
mp4-file, aspect ratio 16:9,
Limited edition: 5 + 2AP, available.
A variation of 25 stills of a dancing Person generate an artificial choreography. He is dancing to a rhythm, which is formed similarly by modules of natural and artificial sounds. A metaphor of life’s futility.
Dancer: Dominik Feistmantl
Exhibition history (selection):
2022 – dança em foco – Internationales Festival Video & Tanz
Rio de Janeiro / BRA
2022 – ART MUC, München
2022 – EIVV International Meeting on Video Dance and Video Performance, Valencia / ES
2019 – International Screendance Festival, Freiburg
“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)
2022,
video with sound,
animation, 3:02 min
“Come,O death, you brother of sleep,
come and lead me away from here;
release my little ship’s rudder,
bring me to a safe harbour!”
from: Johann Sebastian Bach Kreuzstabkantate, BWV56
2022,
video with sound, animation, 7:45 min,
Language: German with English subtitle,
Limited edition: 5 + 2AP.
In this artificial underwater world, countless tiny will-o’-the-wisps buzz around. They symbolize all the people who drowned while fleeing to Europe between 2014 and 2022. At the bottom of this sea, we listen to the stories of five young refugees: Jayjay and Ismail from Afghanistan, Zeeshan from Pakistan, Abdi from Ethiopia, and Sulayman from The Gambia. They tell of their families, their flight from violence, and their hopes and dreams.
Water is a habitat, a border, and a grave. As part of a global ecosystem, it connects continents and people, but it also reveals the consequences of political and ecological crises. The work highlights the close interconnection between displacement, sustainability, and climate change: Droughts, floods, dwindling resources, and destroyed livelihoods are exacerbating existing conflicts worldwide and forcing more and more people to migrate. The sea thus becomes a symbol of an ecologically and socially interconnected world in which human actions have far-reaching consequences for the environment and life itself.
The beauty of life and its antropogenic death.
2022, video with sound, animation, 4:45 min
I watch my children play. I search their movements, their words, for traces of my own failures. Will they become the measure by which I am judged?
Mantra is an experimental short film that reflects on the myth of motherhood. What does it mean to be a “good” mother? And who decides?
For centuries, the image of the mother has been shaped by religious ideals—most notably by the figure of Mary in Western culture. She embodies male fantasies of chastity, obedience, selflessness, and unconditional devotion—virtues still echoed in patriarchal expectations of women today.
But this image is beginning to crack. Women demand autonomy, complexity, and contradiction.
Mantra questions inherited ideals and exposes the tension between inner truth and external judgment. A meditation on motherhood—not as myth or moral role, but as lived, evolving identity.
Old photographs in a family album come to life in a strange way. It is my eyes that look at me from their faces. I “slip” into my mother like into a piece of clothing, then into my father, my brother, my grandmother – one figure after another.
How does it feel to bring the dead back to life?
These are people with whom I was deeply connected – their stories continue to have an effect on me, I am their “descendant”. Who am I and what have they made of me? Does a part of them live on in me?
The Fitting is an experimental short film about memory, origin and identity – an attempt to get closer to one’s own roots physically and emotionally, image by image.
2013,
Photo album, different papers, acryl, gaze,
34 x 21 x 6 cm,
video 2:20 min, mp4-file, aspect ratio 16:9,
Limited edition: 5 + 2 AP, available.
An old family album is filled with personal spiritual connections to the past: letters, pictures, words…. It is an attempt to reconstruct the past with the means of the present. But how much truth is there in it? And how much utopia?
The greater the distance in time and place to the past, the more the truth is reduced to the essential – a metaphor about space and time, about home and childhood.
The headscarf is a symbol. It tells of femininity and oppression, of tradition and religion, of yesterday and tomorrow. The headscarf plays an important role in many societies. In fact, the black headscarf is the most striking thing I remember from my childhood as a member of the German minority in Romania. It was a visible sign of marriage and “Germanness”. The headscarf still accompanies me in my life today: socially, politically, personally.
This work is available as a physical object or video.
