"Model Collapse": Kick-off for New Festival Vienna Digital Cultures
The event at five locations, organized by Kunsthalle and Foto Arsenal Vienna, starts today online and at the Kunsthalle at Karlsplatz and runs until May 18.
On the website viennadigitalcultures.at, you can take a digital excursion into the "Woosphere" of artist Joey Holder - a world "in which non-human beings inscribe themselves into our collective imagination," as described in the commissioned work. The immersive installation finds a physical extension at the Kunsthalle at Karlsplatz: You actually enter the dark "Woosphere."
Before that, as a gateway to the exhibition, the audience is greeted with a completely different engagement with digital art. On a screen, Eva & Franco Mattes' video "But I Like Human" is shown, a montage of TikTok livestreamers who "pretend to be robots pretending to be humans," explained Samman about the bizarre activity for non-insiders. "Highly entertaining," said the curator.
Festival Vienna Digital Cultures: Inside the Camera
After leaving the "Woosphere," the light changes radically. An installation by the collective Troika bathes the room in the hues of the RGB filter, an image system closely linked to machine vision, namely in red, green, and blue. Samman raved about visiting at sunset: "It almost feels like being inside a camera."
The hall has more to offer, such as "Calculating Empires," a 24-meter-long diagram by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, "which makes the historical entanglements of technology, power, and corporeality visible over half a millennium." It took five years to work on it, and all illustrations were handcrafted, Crawford recounted. The intention behind it: to make visible that AI has a long (pre-)history. The tapestry tells, among other things, of industrialization, the birth of biometrics, and the introduction of the telephone.
While viewing, one must be careful not to stumble over sculptures that Arvida Byström has crafted from "lifelike" sex dolls. The artist examines the aesthetics and implications of deepfake pornography (an example of the latter is documented in a slideshow). The work refers to a performance on May 17 at the "House of the Republic," as the former broadcasting house is called during the festival weeks, which she realizes with an AI-controlled sex doll.
Journey into the Machine Subconscious
Two screens finally show Mathias Gramoso as he observes himself in the phone display for 24 hours. His work "Perpetual Echo" addresses digital forms of narcissism. From the real back to the digital exhibition: On the festival platform, the film "The Bastard Fields" by Most Dismal Swamp premieres. The hallucinatory journey "through the cultural and machine subconscious" will also be shown at the Reaktor cinema.
(APA/Red)
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