Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings

The exhibition “Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings” is a presentation of ten new installations by JUNGE AKADEMIE fellows whose artistic research examines artificial intelligence. These speculative and experimental practices question and materialise how power and ethics are dealt with in the context of AI. The focus here is less on artistic innovations that improve existing systems by making them more ethical but rather on giving visibility to the social, historical, cultural and political realities and forces that have given rise to AI and continue to shape it. In response to the fragile realities of machines and their extractivist logic, algorithmic violence and techno-solutionism, the artists create poetic worlds, playful concepts and strategies of repair. They develop alternative paradigms, narratives and imaginings of technologies and a digital life beyond the systems of Big Tech. Themes range from deep-sea cables as historical power conduits to Indigenous technologies and cosmologies, AI-based human models, queer and decolonial computing and questions about digital immortality.

The JUNGE AKADEMIE, the international artist-in-residence programme at the Akademie der Künste, has been tackling the topic of AI since 2019 through its Human Machine Fellowship, in partnership with the E.ON-Stiftung’s VISIT programme, and AI Anarchies, which is funded by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The exhibition “Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings” brings together the artistic results in a major show.

With the fellows:
Sarah Ciston, Sara Culmann, D’Andrade & Walla Capelobo, Petja Ivanova, Pedro Oliveira, Sahej Rahal, Aarti Sunder, SONDER (Peter Behrbohm und Anton Steenbock), Natasha Tontey, Tin Wilke & Laura Fong Prosper

Cooperation partners:
E-WERK Luckenwalde, VISIT, ZK/U-Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Weise7, Haus für Poesie

Media partners:
Berlin Art Link – Flux FM – Fräulein Magazine – HOLO – TAZ

Opening programme:

7 pm
Welcome
Clara Herrmann, Head of the JUNGE AKADEMIE
Nishant Shah, Professor of Global Media and Director of the Digital Narratives Studio, The Chinese University, Hong Kong
Siegfried Zielinski, Professor for Media Theory at Universität der Künste Berlin and member of the Visual Arts section, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Foyer / Stairs

7:30 pm
No Knots, Only Loops
Sarah Ciston, Performance, 20 min.
Hall 1

8 pm
Ghosting the Machine
Sahej Rahal, Performance, 20 min.
Hall 2

8:30 pm
Transients #1
M Takara – Drums
Pedro Oliveira – Mel-filterbank Performance, 20 min.
Hall 1

9:30 pm
Oasis dot wet
Wet.do
Petja Ivanova, Iyo Bisseck, Rain Rose, Kaya Zakrzewska, Performance, 30 min.
Grass Garden

10:15 pm
Transients #2
Gugulethu Duma – Voice, Electronics
Pedro Oliveira – Mel-filterbank Performance, 30 min.
Studio Foyer

10:45 pm
DJ set by ABIBA
Studio Foyer