2025/02

EIKON #128 | FAKE NEWS

Artists: Cao Fei | Manuel Gorkiewicz | Anna Jermolaewa | Barbara Probst | Lisa Rastl

Languages | Deutsch / Englisch
Size | 280 x 210 mm
ISBN | 978-3-904083-19-5
100 Pages
Prize: € 18,00 (inkl. 10% USt)

CONTENT

PROJECTS
Markus Krottendorfer | Christina Natlacen

A WORK IN PROFILE
Elfriede Mejchar | Margit Zuckriegl

ARTS AND STUDIES
Mirjam Reiter | Lina Leonore Morawetz

FOCUS
AI MEETS ART
Performing Utopia | alien productions
Wünschenswerter Kontrollverlust | Merzmensch

FORUM
An Interview with Petra Schaper Rinkel, Rector of the Angewandte | Carl Aigner, Nela Eggenberger

EXHIBITIONS
Günter Brus | Rudolf Sagmeister
Songs for the Changing Seasons | Roland Schöny
Otto Piene. Paths to Paradise | Pia Draskovits
Shahryar Nashat. Streams of Spleen | Chiara Ottavi
Francesca Woodman & Julia Margaret Cameron. Portraits to Dream In | Simon Bowcock
Theater for the Camera. Photographic Passions of the Imperial Court Actor Hugo Thimig | Andrea Winklbauer
Nancy Holt. Circles of Light | Veronika Rudorfer

DATES
mit Michelle Cotton

COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Mladen Bizumic: Afterlives

PUBLICATIONS / REVIEW
Size Matters: Größe in der Fotografie | Margit Neuhold
Gundula Schulze Eldowy | Peter Kunitzky
Duarte Amaral Netto, João Paulo Serafim, Rodrigo Tavarela Peixoto, Valter Ventura: Pickpocket | Margit Mössmer
Das Künstlerbuch als multimediale Enzyklopädie | Thomas Ballhausen

EDITORIAL

Dear Readers!
“Every time needs its utopia(s). A society that does no longer reflect its development is uncanny, a monstrosity. However, utopian speculation is rather dubious today. […] Utopian thinking seems naïve, dangerous hubris.” (1) Today, Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher’s plea, formulated more than twenty years ago, seems more topical, their demand more urgent than ever: the horror scenarios in the face of climate collapse, wars, and conflicts—accompanied by rapid developments in the field of artificial intelligence, which currently (still?) remain unreflected (see the interview with Petra Schaper Rinkel, pp. 64ff.)—are so present that the notion of utopia has something anachronistic about it.
The artist group alien productions, which is at the center of this issue’s focus “AI Meets Art,” also notes that, due to the omnipresence of artificial intelligence, big data, and deep learning, “the future has lost everything worth striving for. It has become a place of vague fears.”(2) For Martin Breindl, Norbert Math, and Andrea Sodomka, the artists behind the collective, the demand is simple and obvious: “What we need are better utopias.” With Performing Utopia, an AI opera for which artificial intelligences were specially trained using historical utopian texts and in the performance of which human and artificial voices then interact, they attempt to create a “musical-philosophical dispute about worlds of possibilities,” using precisely the technology that, “depending on how you look at it, augments or threatens human intelligence”—a fantastic undertaking that is then historically localized in a detailed essay by Merzmensch (pp. 54ff.). Performing Utopia has thus indeed become a hybrid of human and artificial intelligences and perceptions: “In the sense of a posthumanistic ecology, namely the realization that only intelligent networks remain capable of survival—regardless of whether humans are involved in them or not.”
Nela Eggenberger | EIKON | May 2024

(1) Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, Latent Utopias. Experiments within Contemporary Architecture, Vienna and New York: Springer Verlag, 2002, 7.
(2) This and all subsequent quotes: alien.mur.at/performing-utopia/index.html [last accessed on May 1, 2024].

ART DIRECTION & DESIGN
Grafikum – Studio für Gestaltung

TRANSLATION
Vera Coccyx (E/D), G.rard A. Goodrow (D/E), Nelson Wattie (D/E)