Shadow awAIkening

»Review«

It’s not just the exhibition in the “Art Criticism Reinstalled” space that has changed. With the new works on display, the context has shifted as well: the AI processor hums quietly away, laying the groundwork for a peculiar kind of artificial vitality. Within the exhibits, the depicted figures come alive, stepping out of their frames — and whenever the processor is running, they lead independent lives as shadow beings, roaming the digital exhibition as its visitors. When the processor goes idle, they vanish once more. The AI chip constructs parallel worlds that ultimately no one can truly see into, let alone control. What may appear to be fiction here is not necessarily fictitious: autonomous, self-optimizing AI, due to its sheer complexity and the volume of data it processes, reaches a point beyond which humans can no longer follow its reasoning — and therefore can no longer control it.