Michael Klipphahn-Karge // Contemporary Conjurations: AI and Magic in Art
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NameMichael Klipphahn-Karge
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Research project: Contemporary Conjurations: AI and Magic in Art
Contemporary Conjurations: AI and Magic in Art
Subject: History of Art
Mentoring professors: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schankweiler und Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jens Krzywinski
The dissertation project pursues the thesis that a discourse entanglement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and magic is demonstrable in the art of the reflexive modernism.
The thesis therefor examines three exemplary artistic positions of the early 21st century. The works by Agnieszka Polska ("The Demons Brain," 2018), Jordan Wolfson ("Female Figure," 2014), and Hito Steyerl ("This Is The Future" and "Power Plants," 2019) address AI as a narrative, an artistic strategy, and as a technical element and material of artistic work, mediating contemporary discourses on technology while making use of a new, more open concept of magic.
Remarkably, in their works that treat magic and AI as focal points, the artists often realize visualizations of the magical by means of AI technology and, conversely, depict the proceduralities of AI by means of magical visual practices. A nexus that seems to point to new material and contextual contexts of meaning in early 21st century art. Moreover, a demonstration of the entanglement of magic and AI as a narrative and structure that emphasizes intentionally inconsistent contexts of meaning could be read as contemporary art's self-reflexive commentary on its own enigma.
Meanwhile, overlaps between the two discourses can also be worked out in the history of art and culture, which can be made productive for a historicization of the subject of AI and an envisioning of the subject of magic. The order of the works in the dissertation follows the respective artistic reflection of temporality. Agnieszka Polska's work discusses historical organizational forms of the machinalization and capitalization of mental and physical labor. A subsequent visualization of historical and, above all, personal magical references based on technical innovations in art is found in the work of Jordan Wolfson. It concludes with a look into the future in Hito Steyerl's works, in which predictive analytical procedures are used for this purpose. What all these works have in common is that they emphasize knowledge of non-hegemonic knowledge systems and use corresponding symbols and images to criticize models of Western societies: they criticize capitalist economic structures, the fractured relationship between technologized humanity, nature, and ecology, and the marginality of certain social groups emphasized by digitalization.
Magic and AI are much debated and also contested terms and concepts that undergo very different reevaluations in reflexive modernity. These are negotiated in the dissertation: The magical as a figure of thought has been subjected to revision in poststructuralist debates. According to this re-contextualization, the resistive potential of the magical is emphasized and the concept is no longer described as a gesture of exclusion and identity formation processes in the context of occidental reception of religion. In more recent debates, AI is thematized as a disruptive technology in the sense of a radical innovation that is capable of replacing existing technologies, and as an object of imagination that stimulates systematic critique and friction, and is thus reflected upon in a more Western scrutinizing way than has been the case in the history of the previous determination of the term.
Last update: 22.11.2021
CV
Since 2021 |
Editor, peer-reviewed online journal w/k - Zwischen Wissenschaft & Kunst, Düsseldorf, Germany |
since 2019 | PhD in art history, chair of Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schankweiler, TU Dresden |
2015–2021 |
Curator and art educator, Kunstraum Stephanie Kelly e. V./Galerie Stephanie Kelly, Dresden |
2017–2020 | Lecturer at the Chair of Theory of Artistic Design and Psychology of Art, Department of Art Education, TU Dresden |
until 2015 | Studies and postgraduate studies in fine arts, art history and aesthetic philosophy in Dresden, Berlin and Usti nad Labem (CZ) |
Further publications, presentations, activities, etc.
see Research Portal of TU Dresden
External Links
- Twitter: klippvanhahn