Yannick Hofmann

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.

What can the museum of the future look like? The intelligent.museum project has been developing artistic AI prototypes for new exhibition concepts since 2020.
In the exhibition works and presentations that can be experienced interactively open up new perspectives for exhibition visitors and become a catalyst for a reflective approach to AI. AI technologies are already present in many areas of our daily lives: voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, recommendation systems in online stores, autonomous vehicles, AI-based translation tools or intelligent personal assistants. Artists particular raise questions about the future impact of this rapidly evolving technology, explore its potential consequences, and encourage critical thinking about its ethical and societal implications.

The new, seventh edition of Device_art festival of art, robotics and new technologies at Museum of Contemporary art in Zagreb once again brings exciting experiences and new perspectives on devices, gadgets, and machines that surround us, ignite our thoughts, provide us with comfort as well as disturbance.
As this year's festival concept, "Machine Does Not Give Change" invites us to rethink our increasingly intimate relationship with technology in a time of constant unpredictability and profound changes. An artwork asks us to scream in front of a mirror to interact with it (and release some of the stress and negative energy), while a simple walk through the Novi Zagreb neighborhood takes us on an expedition into the sea of electromagnetic sound – fascinating and frightening at the same time. Dream machines, ballerinas from the future, space whiskers and a robotic sculptor-ecologist – all to be found on the charming, humorous, rebellious Device_art playground.
This year the festival is developed in collaboration with a group of curators from ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and is conceived as a dialogue between the German and Croatian "device art" scene. This is in line with the long tradition of the festival and its previous editions dedicated to the Japanese, Canadian, Californian, Czech and Slovenian scene, as well as the global tech-art tendencies presented in its last iteration. As one of the leading international festivals that has been focusing on technology in contemporary art since 2004, Device_art in its new edition continues to push boundaries of artistic media through witty and provocative works and concepts that question the potentials, limitations and impacts of technology on everyday life.

CRAWLERS is an anonymous collective of social bots crawling user data and establishing an uncanny parallel social network of warped truths and stolen personal information. The army of disguised fake identities acts like human profiles in order to scrape text, data and information from the befriended user accounts. They interact with their friends, send requests, comments and thus slowly build up a growing network. They gather information and images from the friend profiles which are then immediately transformed, altered and manipulated. Based on this transformed data a new mirror website of the social profiles is created step by step. On this page all accounts for the crawled profiles of real humans will be recreated in a modified, strangely alienated format. Everybody who has been crawled by the bot group is from that moment on represented in the uncanny mirror network. A link will be sent to each human profile with an invitation to examine their alter ego online. The resulting mirror representations feel close to reality but slightly off. No information is correct anymore and everything has been renamed and tempered with. Artificial intelligences are incorporated to alter, modify and enhance the information of the user profiles. Context sensitive deep-learned models are able to create half-truths and seemingly coherent alternative worlds. The concept behind it deals with the ubiquitous behavior of undercover bot agents and the sensation of stolen personal data. The altered site is like a dark mirror site of yourself, where your identity, data and social network have been transferred to a suspicious new location. It’s a digital parallel world, a dark illegal space of uncanny parallels. The piece runs continuously on several servers and can be visited online. Resulting profiles and the active bots are displayed in an installation format.

"Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible." – Paul Klee, 1920
"Sound art does not reproduce the audible, but makes audible." – <SA⁄JO>, 2012

The ZKM is dedicating a two-month retrospective exhibition to the oeuvre of composer and media artist Joachim Krebs (1952–2013), providing an insight into the artist's multifaceted and widely diversified work. The exhibition presents his early performances as a keyboard player in the agitative rock music drama group Checkpoint Charlie, musical-theatrical collages in the avant-garde context as well as multimedia installations/environments and radiophonic productions by the artist couple known as <sabine schäfer ⁄⁄ joachim krebs>.
After studying piano and composition at the Karlsruhe University of Music, Joachim Krebs composed award-winning instrumental music before he focused on electroacoustic music at the beginning of the nineties. From the mid-nineties Joachim Krebs used the sampler as an audio-microscope and applied an electroacoustic analytical and processing method ("EndoMicroSonoScopy") specifically developed by him. With that he transported formerly imperceptible melodies, harmonies and rhythms from sounds of animals and nature into the audible range. As the artist couple known as <sabine schäfer ⁄⁄ joachim krebs> (from 2009 called – <SA⁄JO>), from the end of the nineties Schäfer and Krebs developed and realized spatially overlapping installations and sound art projects. Inspired by the philosophy of French intellectual Gilles Deleuze, they dedicated their collaborative work to researching micro and macro dimensions in nature.
In addition to extensive audio and video recordings, (graphic) scores and original manuscripts from the artist’s estate, the stereophonic environment Sonic Lines 'n' Rooms No. 7 by <sabine schäfer ⁄⁄ joachim krebs> as well as a station for interactive audio-microscopy will be presented in the exhibition. Four audiotape pieces originating between 1995 and 1999 in the course of the Joachim Krebs project series Artificial Soundscapes will be presented for the first time in a binaural audio version through which a three-dimensional auditory impression can come into being by means of headphones.
To celebrate the acquisition of Joachim Krebs’ artistic estate, the concert In-Between Earth and Sky with selected works by the artist as well as a brief presentation by Sabine Schäfer will be held on the opening evening from 7 PM in the Badische Landesbibliothek. Within the scope of the event Media Lounge at Six at ZKM, on June 1, 2017 Sabine Schäfer will be giving the lecture Mikroskopischer Blick in den Naturklang to commemorate the microcosm and macrocosm of nature in the works of the artist couple .