REIMAGINE TOMORROW, 1954–2024

_Starting November 17 at 11 AM CET, the artworks that are part of REIMAGINE TOMORROW will be displayed on the exhibition page in the order they are hung in the exhibition. Please click on each piece to receive more information. You will find details about the artwork, interviews with the artists and contributors, and more. (If you have any questions, please contact us.)

EXPANDED.ART presents the international group exhibition REIMAGINE TOMORROW, 1954–2024: AI IN CONTEXT #2 at Heilig Geist, a former church near the Zeche Zollverein, as part of the AI Biennale in Essen. The exhibition is curated by Anika Meier. She has invited more than 50 international artists, along with 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 Phillip 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, 1954-2024, 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 first made 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.

CONTRIBUTORS
With contributions from Fellowship, 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 MakersPlace.

ARTISTS: AI
With Ai-Da Robot, Kevin Abosch (Kate Vass), Refik Anadol (KÖNIG GALERIE), Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett, James Bloom, Botto, Sougwen Chung, Crosslucid, Geoff Davis, Mark Dorf (Blueshift), Boris Eldagsen, Far, Amir Fattal (KÖNIG GALERIE), Joan Fontcuberta (Photo Edition Berlin), Aaron Huey, Bård Ionson, 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, and Ziyang Wu.

ARTISTS: AI IN CONTEXT
Herbert W. Franke, 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, Agoston Nagy, Harto, and Qinyi Wang (MUD Gallery).

MEDIA PARTNER
The AI Art Magazine

Title image: Kevin Abosch, Inès, synthetic photography, 2024.