Category: Video Art

Entity Dreams Body

Posted on | by Erika
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Entity Body Simulation Boundaries
Entity dreams body, 2025, room installation with 2 videos, tv sculpture, 10 polaroids (2025 / 2015 / 2011). Simulation.

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?

Hybrid Reality

This idea is embodied in ten Polaroids showing a toy – strikingly similar to the hybrid creature – in the hands of a child. The photographs are based on documentary material and bear the traces of a real past.

From another corner of the room, a voice muses on “posthumanism.” A tower of pedestals rises before the viewer, topped by a small CRT television that serves as a “head.” On its screen, the digitally reconstructed face of a child appears, created from archival material. Meanwhile, the voice and accompanying text are generated by artificial intelligence.

The work combines memory and technological simulation and condenses questions about identity, reproduction, and the role of humans in the posthuman age.

Music: Rasmus Kassnel-Henneberg

A New Humanism in the Digital Transformation

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/

Eternal Hunt

Posted on | by Erika
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2026, video with sound, animation, 2:40 min

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.

Perpetuum Mobile

Posted on | by Erika
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Spatial installation, 76th Great Swabian Art Exhibition, Hall 1 – Room for Art in the Glaspalast, Augsburg, 2024

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.

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.

Metamorphosis

Posted on | by Erika
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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).

Cycle of Prayer

Posted on | by Erika
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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.

A Video for Diedorf

Posted on | by Erika

It’s so nice to live here! A little insight into everyday life, club activities, volunteer work, the beauty of the Westliche Wälder recreational area, and much more…

The video can be viewed here.

Out-Takes and Making-of. Photos: Erika Kassnel-Henneberg, Martina Bühler

Deep Paradise

Posted on | by Erika
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Deep Paradise @ St.Konrad / Augsburg-Bärenkeller, 2023, video installation with sound, 6:07 min

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 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.

Videokunst von Erika Kassnel-Henneberg

Post Mortem

Posted on | by Erika
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2023, Video with sound, 5:31 min

“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.

Polaroid, Screenshot aus der Videoarbeit Sandbox

Sandbox V

Posted on | by Erika
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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?