11 April 24

Panel talk 8 pm

Venue: panke.gallery

In German

Admission free

Live-Set with MetaCuts from 9.30 pm

Venue: Panke Club

Admission: 10 Euro

Registration via reservation@kw-berlin.de

Panel talk at panke.gallery at 8 pm

With: Luzius Bernhardt and Liz Haas (UBERMORGEN) and Sakrowski, moderated by Noemi Garay

For about a decade a number of journalists, art historians and home decor magazines have been claiming that – in times of digitalization, globalization and polycrises, as many people retreat into the idyllic and private sphere – Biedermeier is back. Online phenomena such as the trad wife trend as well as cottage, cabin, comfy or cozycore aesthetics mirror a similar desire far beyond German contexts. The claim of this panel is that AI tools are particularly well suited to develop the visual language for conservative worldbuilding and that – with the rise and now mainstream availability of AI image generating tools – these trends and the implications that go with them carry even more weight.

Originating as a descriptor for a specific furniture style, Biedermeier gradually expanded its scope in the german-speaking countries of the early 19th century, to encompass genre painting, eventually encapsulating the bourgeois lifestyle and mentality from the Congress of Vienna in 1814/1815 to the 1848 Revolution. The term “Vormärz” emerged concurrently, denoting the opposing political movement advocating for revolutionary change during this transformative period. The Biedermeier era marked the emergence of a distinctive culture and art of the bourgeoisie, manifesting in various aspects such as house music, interior design, fashion, and literature of the time. These expressions were often characterized as ‘homely’ or ‘conservative,’ focussing on privacy and aestheticizing domestic life.

The possibility to create entire worlds through AI-generated images may provide a sense of control and authority, at least to well-trained prompters, that is in line with the (Neo) Biedermeier mindset. These AI-generated image worlds are using a standardized, visually familiar language, they tend to favor and perpetuate commercial and standardized aesthetics. The generated environments often resemble the familiar, reinforcing conservative or even fascist imagery.

The discussion prompts reflection on the consequences of standardized aesthetics and the artistic strategies that might be used to navigate them in an era dominated by AI-generated imagery.

Noemi Garay is a freelance researcher and curator. She studied culture and aesthetics of digital media in Frankfurt and Lüneburg, and works with a strong focus on digital art and net art. Since 2020, she regularly coordinates and curates projects and exhibitions at panke.gallery, a project space for net-based arts in Berlin, and works with the media group Bitnik as a researcher.

Robert Sakrowski holds a master’s degree in art history and works as a curator in Berlin. From 1999 to 2003, he curated and organized exhibitions and lectures on net art as part of the netart-datenbank.org project. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as a researcher on the Netzpioniere 1.0 research project at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz. Since 2007, he has been working intensively on the web.video phenomena under the name CuratingYouTube.net and provides gridr.org (2012), an online tool specially designed for this purpose. In 2014/15 he worked as a curator for the transmediale festival 2015 capture all. Since October 2016 he has managed and curated the panke.gallery in Berlin-Wedding. He is a founding member (2019) of the Center for Net Art. In 2022 he opened the project space /rosa in Berlin Mitte with the Center for Net Art and panke.gallery. With Jeremy Bailey and Vincent van Uffelen he developed the web platform openAR (2021) for presenting and curating web-based augmented reality objects.

UBERMORGEN (b. 1995, CH/AT/US) is an artist duo synthesizing autistic actionist lizvlx (Liz Katlein, she) & pragmatic visionary Luzius Bernhard (they). Net.art pioneers, ‘Master Deducers’, and ‘Media Hackers’ are widely recognized for their Online Actionism, Haute Couture NFTs & Websites, Polarising Social Experiments, Radical Research & Empathy, Dark AI, nonbinary Primitivism & Conceptualism. CNN called them ‘Maverick Austrian Business People’ during their Vote-Auction project, challenging the FBI, CIA, & NSA (US presidential election 2000). A series of conceptual hacks (EKMRZ Trilogy, 2005–08) shook the foundations of the dominating e-commerce giants: Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir and The Sound of eBay. The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine (2021) used AI-TikTikPop to catapult visitors into 64 twisted parallel universes. Today UNINVITED AI Horror Film & Crypto Art collide to create deeply nostalgic synthetic organisms and The D1cks, hand-pixelated 1 of 1 Haute Couture NFTs reveal ‘L‘Origine du pixel’.

Live-Set at Panke Club with MetaCuts starting at 9.30

With: Cybermission (Emotional Waves), Paulawar (Takseer), Flo ((hhy & kampala unit), BassDee (Radio Massive / Hidden Hawaii), BarbNerdy (Support Your Local Ghetto), Clusterduck.

After the panel discussion, Panke Club will host the platform MetaCuts, who are inviting artists to dive into the sonic dimension of D&B, jungle, bass and dub, highlighting the connection between digital and network-based arts, sound and poetry. For this iteration, there will be live and DJ sets by Cybermission (Emotional Waves), Paulawar (Takeseer), Flo (hhy & kampala unit), and live visuals by Clusterduck.