EIKON #126

Editorial Content Order

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

Carl Aigner | Alien Productions (Martin Breindl, Norbert Math, Andrea Sodomka) | Thomas Ballhausen | Simon Bowcock | Pia Draskovits | Nela Eggenberger | Christian Höller | Peter Kunitzky | Helena Lang | Fiona Liewehr | Maren Lübbke-Tidow | Merzmensch (Vladimir Alexeev) | Margit Mössmer | Lina Leonore Morawetz | Christina Natlacen | Susanne Neuburger | Margit Neuhold | Chiara Ottavi | Veronika Rudorfer | Rudolf Sagmeister | Roland Schöny | Caroline von Courten | Andrea Winklbauer | Margit Zuckriegl

Languages | German / English
Dimensions | 280 x 210 mm
ISBN |  978-3-904083-19-5
100 pages

Price: € 18,00 (incl. 10% VAT)

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Content

Editorial

“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
for 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].

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