Category: Work

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

An organic something, similar to an eye, scans the environment like a surveillance camera. It is MUM. It watches over us. A person working on a sewing machine can be seen from different angles on 3 monitors.

The recordings were made during a work-in-progress as part of the co-operation project “About the spatial dimension of skinning“. They show the sculptor Esther Irina Pschibul sewing a “protective skin” from dried pig bladders.

“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