Yannick Hofmann (*1988 in Offenbach a. M., Germany) lives and works as an artist and researcher in Karlsruhe. As the artistic director of the intelligent.museum project since 2020, he collaborates with a team of software developers and museum visitor research experts, pushing the boundaries of hybrid formats and applications for the future of museums. Having spent almost a decade at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, he co-directed their artistic research and production department before joining Fraunhofer in 2023.
Wishing Well uses AI to transform verbally expressed dreams, wishes and fantasies of exhibition visitors into images. The installation echoes Marcel Duchamp's well-known ready-made Fountain (1917). He identified a urinal as an art object and signed it under a pseudonym, thus challenging the prevailing definition and initiating a debate about what can and cannot be considered art. Today, we are debating this question again: generative AI models can perform artistic tasks such as writing, making music, and painting. This major change in cultural production has an impact on the future role and self-image of artists.
The five-part online panel Taming AI on art and AI is dedicated to the various areas in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are currently relevant for cultural institutions and not least for society. In five panel discussions, artists, curators, scientists, activists and developers meet and focus on current discourses on AI. The artistic and curatorial fields of application of AI are elaborated and the challenges and opportunities that AI technologies offer for the respective field are discussed.
The research exhibition BioMedia: The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe presents works that intersect the realms of art, science, and technology. The media systems on show, which range from digital, computer-generated, and computer-simulated systems to complex adaptive robots and interactive installations, simulate various different aspects of life beyond movement and raise fundamental questions about the interaction between human and non-human beings and what inorganic life might mean in the future. The term BioMedia or biomimetic media is used here to refer to media that exhibit life-like forms of behaviour. Over sixty artists have contributed works illustrating the exhibition themes. The book accompanying the show focuses on the artworks, which are described in detail in richly illustrated texts.