In Entity Dreams Body, the boundaries between life and simulation are explored: A breathing skin balloon rises and falls, next to it a child’s toy whose lifelike eyes return the gaze. Human fragments, technology, and toys merge into a hybrid being – familiar and eerie at the same time.
The work negotiates the boundaries between humans and machines, between what is technically feasible and what is ethically acceptable. Prostheses and enhancements do not appear as progress, but as unsettling transformations that alienate humanity. Instead of envisioning harmonious coexistence, the installation reveals the ambivalence and unease of a possible future: Where does the synthetic begin to transform the human? And how can a balance between humanity and alienation still be conceived in a world of permanent enhancement?
The Installation
The loop extends into the physical space: ten Polaroids showing a toy—breathtakingly similar to the hybrid creature—in a child’s hands. The photographs are based on documentary material and bear the traces of a real past.
From another corner of the room, a voice drifts in, rambling about “posthumanism.” A sculpture made of pedestals rises up, with a small CRT television serving as its “head.” The screen displays the digitally reconstructed head of my son as a child. The voice and text are AI-generated.
The work combines memory and technological simulation and condenses questions about identity, reproduction, and the role of humans in the posthuman era.
At the center of Kassnel-Henneberg’s work is the question of a new humanism. It focuses on the role of humans in a digital world. She explores how artificial intelligence, algorithms, and digital systems are changing what it means to be human. At the same time, she critically asks whether humans can still act autonomously when technological processes influence or even replace decisions.
Her works open a discourse on the relationship between biological existence and technological expansion. This theme runs through her entire Time-Based Media Art portfolio. It shows how technology deeply shapes human perception and identity.
Cross-Media Practice Between Analog and Digital
Kassnel-Henneberg understands her artistic practice as a bridge connecting analog and digital worlds. Therefore, she works across multiple media, including:
Video
CGI (Computer Generated Imagery)
Artificial Intelligence
Polaroid Photography
Collage and Mixed Media
Through this combination, she creates works that exist between reality and simulation, and between documentation and construction. The audience is invited to critically reflect on their perception, which is increasingly shaped by media. At the same time, the use of analog techniques creates a compelling dialogue between past and present.
Education and Interdisciplinary Foundations
Her artistic development is based on an interdisciplinary education. First, she studied restoration at the Bern University of the Arts. There, she learned technical skills and developed a deep understanding of materiality, history, and cultural heritage. She then studied Interactive Media at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences.
This combination of conservation knowledge and digital media expertise forms the foundation of her Time-Based Media Art portfolio. It allows her to connect traditional and modern techniques effectively.
Exhibitions, Festivals, and International Recognition
Kassnel-Henneberg’s works have been presented nationally and internationally. A highlight is her solo exhibition “Uncanny Valley” at the Neue Galerie in the Höhmannhaus of the Augsburg Municipal Art Collections. The exhibition addressed the uncanny feeling that arises when artificial systems increasingly resemble humans.
Additionally, she has participated several times in the FILE – Electronic Language International Festival in São Paulo. This festival is one of the world’s leading platforms for digital and time-based media art. It underscores the international relevance of her work.
Awards and Artistic Recognition
2013: Krumbach Art Prize for the book object “Heimat ist anderswo”
2022: Augsburg District Art Prize for her overall body of work
These awards recognize not only her ongoing engagement with identity, memory, and social change. They also demonstrate the significance of her Time-Based Media Art portfolio in contemporary art.
Teaching, Jury Work, and Media Culture
In addition to her artistic practice, Kassnel-Henneberg works as a lecturer. She teaches at Augsburg University of Applied Sciences and various private art academies. Moreover, she actively participates in juries and supports emerging positions in media art.
Her teaching and curatorial work complements her artistic practice. It also strengthens the discourse around time-based media art in Germany.
Conclusion: Time-Based Media Art as Societal Reflection
Erika Kassnel-Henneberg’s work exemplifies contemporary art that combines aesthetic innovation with social relevance. Her Time-Based Media Art portfolio invites reflection on humanism, technology, and identity in a connected world. At the same time, it shows how art can provide guidance and critical reflection in a complex digital reality. https://eri-kassnel.de/sichtbar-verknuepft-frei/https://gedok-muc.de/
In a room enclosed by concrete walls, the camera circles a golden apple. Beyond the walls, there is no exterior space, no sky—only a formless blackness. Two faceless avatars appear, directing their actions toward the apple without ever reaching it. Its reflective surface reveals a second environment: a sealed-off, abandoned place with caged windows.
The scene is structured as a closed loop. Approach, violence, and repetition intertwine without reaching a conclusion. The apple functions as a fixed point—a center that both focuses and blocks the sequences.
In the end, the room remains empty: surrounded by concrete, covered with traces of action, counting, and marking.
This video shows a corridor-like space with no doors or windows. A pendulum with a light bulb swings like a clockwork between the sides of the room, creating a mechanical rhythm of light and darkness. In this alternation, wall surfaces become visible, covered with fragments of memory: a floral wallpaper, a devotional image, a stuffed deer head, and cryptic formulas that denote “eternity” and “remembering” as variable states. At first, these elements seem familiar and biographically rooted.
With the repetition of the pendulum’s swing, this legibility shifts. The scene loses its intimacy and tips into a condensed, claustrophobic structure. The room appears less as a place than as a system of repetition and feedback, in which personal and historical traces are no longer separable.
The space thus becomes a repository without hierarchy, in which memory is not archived but continuously reconstructed. What appears as biographical material dissolves into an abstract logic of recurrence.
The Installation
This logic continues in the transition to the physical installation. Objects from the video reappear in real space, dissolving the boundary between virtual and physical space. A devotional image of the Christ Child feeding doves and ceramic animal skulls reflect the motifs shown. Individual objects reappear on Polaroids on the wall, including the stuffed deer head. Through this repeated translation between media, things circulate between reality, image, and meaning. Documentation, staging, and ideology become indistinguishable. The space appears both real and constructed – as a symbol of a present in which historical relics, political narratives, and media repetitions create an experience of permanent recurrence.
Extension into physical space: a framed art print, 2 ceramic animal skull sculptures, 11 polaroids.
Spatial installation, 76th Great Swabian Art Exhibition, Hall 1 – Room for Art in the Glaspalast, Augsburg, 2024
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).
This four-part video series explores how landscape is constituted through vision while simultaneously eluding any unambiguous localization. It appears not as a fixed place, but as a moving image that constantly shifts between perception and simulation.
All four videos are designed as loops. With no beginning and no end, they follow a recurring structure reminiscent of both the rhythm of the seasons and the repetition of the Rosary. With each repetition, the perception of the image changes: the familiar becomes foreign, and the foreign becomes familiar. Landscape thus emerges as the result of movement, repetition, and media construction.
01 Grauen (Dawn), 3:31 min
Dawn is breaking. Bare trees pass by; vehicles occasionally cross the scene. Memories echo in the twilight between what has passed and what is to come.
02 Glut (Embers), 7:22 min
Between heat and obscurity, a sandstorm bathes the passing landscape in warm light.
03 Heimsuchung (Visitation), 3:12 min
A thunderstorm is approaching. Raindrops leave fleeting traces as the landscape slowly loses its contours.
04 Wiederkehr (Return), 7:11 min
“Heimat” drifts by. The monotonous sound marks a state between wakefulness and oblivion, while the landscape dissolves into white.
Video installation with sound, 6:07 min, AI-generated, cgi, animation,
mp4 file, 16:9 aspect ratio,
unique + 1AP,
Donated to St. Konrad Church in Augsburg-Bärenkeller.
The apple was and is highly symbolic in many cultures: be it as a symbol of eternal youth, eternal life, love, fertility, paradise and the fall of mankind.
In this installation, a golden apple floats in the air like a fixed star. Familiar places are reflected on its shiny surface (in the Bärenkeller district of Augsburg). How are people doing there and in the world?
In contrast, the two-dimensional portraits in this landscape appear strange. Who are these people? The Holy Family? Our neighbours? They never existed, but are the outputs of an artificial intelligence. We live in a time of upheaval. New technologies give us the feeling that we are increasingly losing control over truth and lies, over good and evil. Is this paradise on earth?
The apple hides a secret inside, because there is a small star made up of 5 seeds. It reminds us that our actions determine whether we come a little closer to “paradise on earth”.
The Installation
The site-specific video installation refers to the real space: church, district, city… by showing it as a digital mirror image, which in turn is reflected by the shiny surface of the golden apple. A kind of visual recursion in which reality and fiction, analog and digital merge.
“We all carry a dead child within us.“Christian Boltanski quotes Tadeusz Kantor
We move through an abandoned house. The rooms hint at their former use without explicitly revealing it. An old class photo keeps appearing on the walls. On the back it reads: “class of 1911.” The people pictured remain nameless. The image begins to change: the children’s eyes move and explore the room in perfect synchrony.
The work draws on a historical photographic practice: post-mortem photography, in which the deceased were staged as if they were still alive—an attempt to capture presence in the image. In the video work, this principle is not simply shifted but subverted: the synchronized eye movements create an artificial liveliness that, precisely through its unnaturalness, makes the absence radically visible.
I position myself as a teacher within the group and become part of this arrangement. The boundary between image and intervention dissolves. In this visual logic, time is not organized linearly, but as a circulating system in which presence and disappearance are inextricably intertwined.
2023, Video with Sound, Animation, 5:36 min, and 15 Polaroids
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?
videoloop with sound, ai animated, music ai generated,
5:30 min, mp4-Datei, Format 16:9,
Limited edition: 5 + 2AP.
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 liveliness? Isn’t this illusion more likely to help us forget the last remnants of our 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 promised by companies such as Storyfile and 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?
The installation
Expanding into Space: A Survey using LEGO® Bricks. Installation view, A Room to Yourself, Sonthofen 2024.
Paula’s real portrait photo can be found in the work Below the Surface (Book Object).
