MENSCH MASCHINE

This exhibition opens with a historical point of view through the artwork called Chronique de L’humanité by the French artist Lucie Planty, whose practice evolves around books and the art of editing. The work displays images and drawings depicting humanity in a chronological order, on a nearly endless scroll. It is a digital reproduction of a book edited by Hachette editions in 1986, from which all textual content has been erased. The last image in the chronicle is Armstrong’s landing on the moon. Hence, in this work, humanity seems to grow into something new from there on…

Chris Dreier is an icon from the Berliner 1980’s punk scene, whose artwork has oftentimes been forged from an activist’s point of view. She created a series of tapestries related to privacy, data and war technology. ERMA is a cushion made of the first machine readable font.

nimiia vibié is a peculiar work by Finnish artist Jenna Sutela for which she exploits a machine to create a Martian language through AI. The source for the language comes from a bacterium which is considered to be Martian.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist and curator, working in the areas of new technologies and new media, ethics, photography and art. She is a Professor of New Media and Communications, and Co-Head of the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.  In her video ‘Non-human vision’, she offers a compelling insight on the idea of AI dreaming up the human outside the human. The work reflects on the idea of when the camera shapes and regulates life, even far beyond ways that humans commonly use to exploit cameras. Non-human photography is neither of, by or for the human.

In How do you see me?, the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg utilized adversarial processes, algorithms that are designed to deceive machine learning systems. In the research, she creates a self-portrait that doesn’t resemble the artist at all, although the image will be recognized as such.

The artist and electronic musician Adina Camhy analyzes in her video MENSCH MASCHINE OR PUTTING PARTS TOGETHER different possible relationships between humans and machines, specially based on gender issues. The work originated when instead of the specific synthesizer the first person narrator asked for, she got an unwanted kitchen robot for her birthday.

The Center for Technological Pain by Dasha Ilina mocks and questions our increasing connection, as a body, to the Internet of Things. The center produces a selection of DIY and Open Source objects to relieve pain caused by digital technologies such as smartphones and laptops. Among the developed prototypes are mechanical eye shields that reduce eyestrain, a headset to free the user’s hands, an insomnia-free box and various more or less absurd gadgets to relieve tense elbows and fingers. CTP also offers DIY manuals on how to build low-tech accessories from cheap materials.

The Center for Technological Pain by Dasha Ilina mocks and questions our increasing connection, as a body, to the Internet of Things. The center produces a selection of DIY and Open Source objects to relieve pain caused by digital technologies such as smartphones and laptops. Among the developed prototypes are mechanical eye shields that reduce eyestrain, a headset to free the user’s hands, an insomnia-free box and various more or less absurd gadgets to relieve tense elbows and fingers. CTP also offers DIY manuals on how to build low-tech accessories from cheap materials.