[spectre] Invitation to preview "To see and to be seen". Artificial intelligence_ exhibition at RUINE DER KÜNSTE BERLIN

[Timo Kahlen]

"To see and to be seen.
Artificial Intelligence and Human Perception"

„Sehen und gesehen werden
Künstliche Intelligenz und menschliche Wahrnehmung“


Curated by Timo Kahlen

Invitation to the exhibition preview on Sunday, September 3, 2023 from 3 - 6 pm
(Performance at 15:30)

Exhibition from September 3 - September 24, 2023
open every Sunday from 15 - 18 pm
(Performance at 15:30)

Ruine der Künste Berlin
Hittorfstr. 5, 14195 Berlin (Dahlem)
U3 Freie Universität
Free admission


Press Release:

We are treading on thin ice. Will AI, Artificial Intelligence, take over the way we see, feel and perceive, experience and shape our world in the future? And what about the grey areas of the mind: what we (don't) think and do, what we (don't) feel and want, what we dream of and (occasionally) destroy? Will all this be read and seen, interpreted and stored, digitally mapped, reproduced, replicated and recreated by machines in the future? Will AI 'ruin' the foundations of art and culture? Or will human creativity, the individual urge to create, the intentional imperfection, prevail - at a time when the ethical, social, copyright and privacy issues of AI are still unresolved, or at best in limbo? Just like the concept of 'artificial intelligence' itself.

Initiated and curated by Timo Kahlen, the exhibition at the Ruine der Künste Berlin is a mind game: it drafts a field of tension between AI and human design, plays with the reciprocal relationship between pre- and after-images, reflects on the relationship between immaterial idea and material representation.

In the exhibition, a total of 40 hand-drawn portraits by 40 different, as yet unknown artists, fascinating interpretations and variants of one and the same photographic source image (a series of self-portraits by the Polish artist Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz from the 1930s), are juxtaposed with more than 40 (out of countless) generations of digital images created in just a few seconds by artificial intelligence: all of them portraits of an anonymous, early female protagonist of photography at the time of its invention (1839). Similar to the creation of the drawings, the digital images of the person(s) portrayed are based on a single source: a prompt in the command line of the AI used, only a few lines long, briefly describing the desired and fictitious result. Thus, the resulting images are not 'photographs' in the strict sense of the word, but diffuse memories, generated 'summa summarum' by the AI, consistently self-similar and self-referential, yet in part convincingly 'alive', by means of a diffusion process: that is, from the sum of all images machine-read, 'learnt' and 'seen' in the internet. 

The precisely staged current exhibition at the Ruine der Künste Berlin is complemented by a live performance (every Sunday at 3:30 pm).


You are cordially invited to the exhibition opening on
on Sunday, September 3, 2023 from 3 - 6 pm.

Admission is free of charge.

Open also by appointment
at mail at timo-kahlen.de

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