The exhibition “Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings” presents ten new installations by fellows of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, whose artistic research examines artificial intelligence. The focus is on speculative and experimental practices that articulate and question how power and ethics are dealt with in the context of AI. In response to the fragile reality of machines and their extractivist logic, algorithmic violence and techno-solutionism, the artists create poetic worlds and playful concepts and strategies of repair. They develop alternative paradigms, historical narratives and imaginings/imaginaries 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 the issue of digital immortality. The large-scale installations use a variety of media: animation, video, computer gaming, drawing, sculpture, wallpaper, sound/composition and costume.

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, Laura Fong Prosper & Tin Wilke, Petja Ivanova, Pedro Oliveira, Sahej Rahal, Aarti Sunder, SONDER (Peter Behrbohm and Anton Steenbock), Natasha Tontey

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