A Programme on Artificial Intelligence

K Allado-McDowell – who is considered an innovator in the collaborative use of AI and machine learning for co-creative and literary work – is the Gropius Bau’s first Writer in Residence. As an integral part of Ether’s Bloom, the residency provides a digital space to investigate and publish writings on Artificial Intelligence in the scope of a three-month collaboration with the Gropius Bau Journal.

During their residency, Allado-McDowell will focus on writings that challenge, re-consider, subvert, collaborate and mingle with learning algorithms. Circling around questions of how technology can enable interspecies futures, Allado-McDowell’s contributions to the Gropius Bau Journal will also focus on making the complex dimensions of Artificial Intelligence accessible to a broader audience. 

Elisa Giardina Papa

Elisa Giardina Papa’s work traces how extractive forms of AI capitalism have strained our capacities for imagining, desiring and labouring. Through political yet poetic framing, she calls attention to those aspects of our lives which, nonetheless, remain radically unruly, untranslatable and incomputable.Her video trilogy Technologies of Care (2016), Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? (2017) and Cleaning Emotional Data (2020) explores how labour and care are reframed by digital economies and artificial intelligence.

Mimi Ọnụọha

Mimi Ọnụọha investigates the gaps in systems of labour, ecology and relations, questioning notions of progress as it pertains to digital and archival media. The short film These Networks in Our Skin (2021) portrays women who re-wire physical cables as a way of reformatting the world and opening up new paradigms for the experiences of Black, Indigenous and hybrid histories. In showing the rewiring of the cables of history, the artist explores a ritual of awakening, trust and forgotten narratives. In the accompanying installation The Cloth in the Cable (2023), Ọnụọha embeds cables with spices, fabrics, dust and other materials, rewiring them with new meanings and ontologies. The site-specific version of the installation was realised with contributions of the Berlin-based interdisciplinary writer and poet hn. lyonga.

Patricia Domínguez

Patricia Domínguez’s Madre Drone (2019–2020) makes explicit the daily struggles of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities to safeguard their territories. Domínguez proposes a myth of multi-species resistance, producing a new vision of cosmological and technological sensitivity and resilience on how to keep going collectively.

kennedy+swan

As part of a new commission for Ether’s Bloom, the Berlin-based duo kennedy+swan will present a series of augmented watercolours which question non-human intelligence. By scanning the works with an AR app, the audience will be invited into a predominantly analogue, yet digital world that – enabled by new AI algorithms – offers deeper access to and empathy for human-animal communication. Machine learning reveals the hidden messages of nature’s manifold languages, enabling a dialogue between “us” and “them”. kennedy+swan’s 3D scans of hand-made miniatures and landscape models add a new layer to the watercolours and reveal the constructive power of upcoming AI systems.