Membrane

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The exhibition project “Membrane” initiated by Ursula Damm presents five multimedia artists who deal in very different ways with perception, learning and interaction, as well as with methods and technologies of artificial intelligence and neuronal networks. In all positions, the processes of filtering, mutual opening and closing, the interpenetration of body, perception and machine play an important role.

Based on computer programmes developed especially for the exhibition, the artistic works interact with the social environment and the visitors, sometimes via virtual reality, artificial intelligence or by means of analogue movement and language, and confront them with machine-generated learning, perception filters and analogue movement analyses. These membranes can be a selective barrier or border, then again they are a text, a system of rules, a game, a material or even a machine.

In an interactive installation by Ursula Damm, software developed in collaboration with Peter Serocka (programming) and Teresa Carasco (sonification) analyses the events on the street in front of the gallery for certain image features. The reading from the movement traces is interpreted as a sum of parameterised image artefacts. In these interpretations, the algorithm animates the found, graphic image features into new images that can be interactively controlled, changed and manipulated. Rachel Smith enters into a collaborative relationship with a neural network and communicates with its black box. In doing so, she decodes its hidden behavioural patterns and processes and makes them analogue receptive. Adelheid Mers’ work is part conversation and movement laboratory, part drawing and digital evaluation and condensation of the process throughout the duration of the exhibition. Mers developed her practice of ‘Performative Diagrammatics’, which visitors can also get to know better in accompanying workshops, from algorithms (Robert Woodley, programming) and an interest in the interpenetration of body knowledge and language. In his installation, Jörg Brinkmann questions the constitution of self-perception in simulated worlds as well as the position of power of those who create these worlds and in which we as viewers have to move. In his poetic installation, Moritz Wehrmann uses simple optical instruments to expand the viewer’s perception – a membrane between visibility and invisibility. He directs the gaze into the supposed distance, redirects it and throws it back onto the viewer’s retina in an irritating way, who in the end recognises himself in a ‘closed circuit’.

In a time of self-learning algorithms of artificial intelligences that, among other things, analyse the data stream of information we upload daily, create profiles, search for the right partner, offer prognoses or create images, music and texts, the artists question and emancipate the role of the viewer and user and invite a cultural debate on technology.

With the kind support of the district funding funds of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Creative Fund of the Bauhaus University Weimar.

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