GROUP SHOW
REIMAGINE TOMORROW, 1954–2024
AI IN CONTEXT #2

HEILIG-GEIST-KIRCHE, ESSEN, GERMANY
17 NOVEMBER – 24 NOVEMBER 2024

OPENING
17 NOVEMBER | 11 AM – 6 PM

PANEL TALK
17 NOVEMBER | 3 – 4 PM
With Kevin Abosch, James Bloom, Boris Eldagsen, Monika Fleischmann, Susanne Päch (Foundation Herbert W. Franke). Moderated by Anika Meier.

KÖNIG GALERIE is pleased to be a contributor at the international group exhibition REIMAGINE TOMORROW, 1954–2024: AI IN CONTEXT #2 at Heilig Geist, as part of the AI Biennale in Essen. Presented by EXPANDED.ART and curated by Anika Meier, this exhibition brings together more than 50 international artists, as well as platforms and galleries from LA to Paris to Shanghai, such as Fellowship and Objkt.com, to reflect on the near future, in which humans and machines will come closer together.
While artists like Herbert W. Franke had to prove in the 1950s that art could be created with machines, machines now create art: such as the decentralized autonomous artist Botto, the painting and drawing robot Ai-Da, and the Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung collaborating with robots.

Since the 1960s, with the introduction of the term Generative Photography by Gottfried Jäger, artists have not only made photos with a camera but have also generated images. The Generative Photography of that time represented a non-representational position of photography, while Post-Photography today—AI-generated images—creates alternative histories that challenge our belief in images, as Philip Toledano does with ANOTHER AMERICA.How long is the future?

No one knows for sure. Not even ChatGPT. After Mark Fisher lamented that we can no longer think the future, Douglas Coupland, Shumon Basar, and Hans Ulrich Obrist celebrated the extreme present. And now Elon Musk wants to make life on Mars possible in the near future. Actually, we need a support group to cope with the fact that we cannot endlessly scroll on our smartphones while we sleep.

If you live in the present, as Lynn Hershman Leeson says, most people think you are living in the future because they themselves do not know what happens in their time. This is exactly what artists who work with technology often reflect on. The exhibition REIMAGINE TOMORROW, 195-2024, which is part of the AI Biennale in Essen, traces this path of art and technology from 1954 to the present: from Generative Photography to AI.

Starting in the 1950s, the question of whether machines can think was explored. The philosopher Max Bense called for rational thinking in art a decade later, and artists like Frieder Nake, Herbert W. Franke, and Gottfried Jäger followed him. They thought the image, which was made first by analog machines and then by digital ones.Today, artists are confronted with the intimacy of the screen and the financialization of social relations, with viral moments and felt truths. Digital art must now be not only likeable but also collectible. Machines dream and hallucinate, according to Refik Anadol.

The exhibition REIMAGINE TOMORROW, 1954-2024, showcases a glimpse of how artists work with technology in their time and what happens to art on the path from thinking to hallucinating machines.
© Group Show, Reimagine Tomorrow, 1954-2024, AI in Context #2, Heilig Geist Church, Essen, November 2024, Presented by EXPANDED.ART, Curated by Anika Meier, Courtesy of the artists 

CONTRIBUTORS
WIth contributions from Fellowship (LA, USA), Photo Edition Berlin (Berlin, Germany), Kate Vass (Zurich, Switzerland), Blueshift by Diane Drubay (Paris, France), Objkt.one, Office Impart (Berlin, Germany), MUD Gallery (Shanghai, China), KÖNIG GALERIE, and more.

ARTISTS: AI
With Ai-Da Robot, Kevin Abosch (Kate Vass), Refik Anadol, Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett, James Bloom, Botto, Sougwen Chung, Crosslucid, Mark Dorf (Blueshift), Boris Eldagsen, Far, Amir Fattal (KÖNIG GALERIE), Joan Fontcuberta (Photo Edition Berlin), Aaron Huey, Kalen Iwamoto, Krista Kim, Mario Klingemann, Emi Kusano, William Latham, Element Lee, Jonas Lund (Office Impart), Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Maria Mavropoulou (KÖNIG GALERIE), Margaret Murphy, Niceaunties (Fellowship), Skye Nicolas, Jurgen Ostarhild, Marcel Schwittlick, Anne Spalter, Sasha Stiles (Objkt.one), Ivona Tau, Phillip Toledano, UBERMORGEN, u2p050, aurèce vettier, Ziyang Wu, and more.

ARTISTS: AI IN CONTEXT
Julia Beliaeva (KÖNIG GALERIE), Herbert W. Franke (KÖNIG GALERIE), Frieder Nake (Photo Edition Berlin), Hein Gravenhorst (Photo Edition Berlin), Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss, Tamiko Thiel, Paul Brown, Claudia Hart, Hans Dehlinger, Heinrich Heidersberger, Gottfried Jäger (Photo Edition Berlin), Pierre Cordier (Photo Edition Berlin), Roger Humbert (Photo Edition Berlin), Karl Martin Holzhäuser (Photo Edition Berlin), Vladimir Bonačić (Photo Edition Berlin), Betha Sarasin, Travess Smalley, Arno Beck, Joachim Bosse, Harto, and more.

ABOUT THE LOCATION
The location of the exhibition REIMAGINE TOMORROW: 1954–2024. AI IN CONTEXT #2, curated by Anika Meier, is the Heilig Geist Church in Essen, Germany.

The architectural concept of the church is characterized by functionality and incorporates design elements of the New Building movement and post-war modernism. The reinforced concrete structure was designed by Gottfried Böhm, who was awarded the internationally renowned Pritzker Prize in 1986 as the first German architect. Throughout his career, Böhm created a total of 69 sacred buildings. The Heilig Geist Church is the first church project that Böhm realized.

He realized the idea of a large tent, which he placed into the industrial environment using glass and concrete. The architecture of the tent, constructed from draped "fabrics," follows the words of scripture (Heb. 13:14): "For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come."

The Heilig Geist Church, along with the associated community buildings, has been listed as a protected monument since February 7, 2019.

EXHIBITED WORKS

Isaac

Amir Fattal

Isaac

Untitled

Amir Fattal

Untitled

Untitled

Amir Fattal

Untitled

Light Forms

Herbert W. Franke

Light Forms

Math Art

Herbert W. Franke

Math Art

Oscillograms

Herbert W. Franke

Oscillograms

Quantum Memories : Noise A, B, C

Refik Anadol

Quantum Memories : Noise A, B, C

Untitled #18

Maria Mavropoulou

Untitled #18

Siren

Julia Beliaeva

Siren

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FEATURED ARTISTS

REFIK ANADOL
Refik Anadol (b. 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey) lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA. He received his MFA from UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts.

Refik Anadol is a media artist, director, and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as his primary material, along with the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualisations of our digitised memories, expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and th...
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AMIR FATTAL
Amir Fattal (b.1978 Tel Aviv, Israel) is an artist and curator based in Berlin. Fattal’s practice is one of reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural references. Working in new technologies such as AI, 3D printing and digital animation, his work highlights their effects on creativity.

In his new series of Post Artificial Painting, Fattal reimagines classic art world scenarios for the 21st century. Amir Fattal starts each work with a series of prompts that coax forth a fictional portrait from the depths of AI’s ‘collective unconscious’. Then, employ traditional oil painting techniques on canvas to bring these AI-gen...
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MARIA MAVROPOULOU
Maria Mavropoulou (b. 1989) lives and works in Athens, Greece. She holds a Master’s in Fine Arts and a BA from the Athens School of Fine Arts.

Mavropoulou is a visual artist using mainly photography, while her work expands to new forms of photographic images, such as VR and screen-captured images, GAN, and AI-generated images. Her work and research focus on the new realities created by connectible devices and the contradictions between the physical and the virtual spaces that we inhabit, addressing issues of technological mediation. By using the most novel technology available to her, she creates work that reflects on the new ways im...
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HERBERT W. FRANKE
Herbert W. Franke (b. 1927 in Vienna, died 2022 in Egling, Germany) was a scientist, author, curator, and pioneer of early digital art. He was a co-founder of Ars Electronica and is widely regarded as one of the most important science fiction writers of his era. Among his many experiments are generative photography and algorithmic art created with some of the first mainframe computers in the 1960s. Before his passing, Franke had made foundational discoveries in the fields of computer programming, speleology, mathematics, as well as publishing treatises on art and technology.

Today, works by Franke can be found (among others) in the co...
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