Seldom has a museum appeared so alive: encounter avatars, moving, talking and learning human-machines. Observe the wealth of movement and ability to react of these odd new creatures. Listen carefully to a mechanical mouse as it talks to a candle. The automation of life, the transformation of our social environments continue apace. Artificial intelligence and its promises are taking control and creating lifelike life forms. As humanity tests the limits of progress, it finds itself on the verge of rendering itself dispensable. With its latest exhibition, Museum Frieder Burda is taking on an experiment by transforming itself into a hybrid and utopian laboratory test center: Curator Udo Kittelmann’s exhibition thematizes and presents some of these artificial beings. Beings that critically inspire the museum and its classical masterpieces. The result: a new dialogue situation that goes through the permutations of the conjunctive “what if“ of a radically altered future.
Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke: they all “transformed“ the classical understanding of art. Their works are considered ground-breaking, their effects epochal. These great icons from the Sammlung Frieder Burda, in dialogue with artificial beings, come together to create multi-dimensional experiential spaces so interwoven and interconnected that visitors must first find their own bearings. The museum comes to life – albeit not real life, rather a reflection of our increasingly artificial contemporary world. The invited artists Louisa Clement, Jordan Wolfson, Timur Si-Qin and Ryan Gander are more or less count among the generation of digital natives and both their biographies and their art reflect the growing power of virtual possibilities.