The artwork Venice, Twilight by Alexander Reben explores the collaboration between humans and AI in contemporary art making. Alexander Reben’s artworks in the field of AI technology set new standards in the investigation of collaboration between man and machine. The digitally generated series shows a series of paintings created by an AI (= Artificial Intelligence) and in turn based on the description of the painting created by another AI.

From a selection of these series, the curator chose one painting, which was then painted by a local artist and is featured in the exhibition. Vines studied robotics at world-renowned MIT and his work explores the inherently human nature of the artificial. His artistic practice explores the potential of artificial intelligence as a creative partner and the ways in which it can challenge traditional notions of creativity and art.

Presendet by Gazelli Art House London

We met Alexander for an interview just before ULTRAMARIN open its doors in Venice and talked about his Art, whats special about Venice and how he sees the current developments in the field of digital art.

VRHAM!: In Venice you’re showing your work Venice, Twilight (2022) – what’s the idea behind it?

ALEXANDER REBEN: The painting presented in Venice is prompted by the ideas of water, the color ultramarine and Venice itself. Because of how my system of artwork generation works, the artwork can both be prompted and curated around particular topics and themes. Venice is a city literally built on technology, AI art makes for a natural pairing with the environment.

Which current developments in the field of digital art are you observing at the moment, what techniques are you already using, which innovations would you like to use (more) of, and how do technical developments influence your work?

Digital and generative art tools are being developed at a quick pace, especially those using AI. As these tools become ever more advanced, their ability to help with creative expression will also grow. I foresee a future where we “collaborate” with these tools to create art and other creative outputs. In my work, I am constantly looking out for any new technical developments as part of my conceptual practice which includes investigating these technologies through the use of experimentation and a lens of absurdity.

Today we introduce our artists from ULTRAMARIN in Venice – please meet the Brazilian artist Gabriel Massan. He shows three works at once with extraordinary digital landscapes that captivate with their crystalline ephemerality and oscillating amorphous structures. His artistic practice deals with the interdependent relationship between fictional existences and digital environments and the investigation of representational possibilities of colorfulness, personal identity and time. We met him in advance for an interview – but read for yourself:

VRHAM!: At ULTRAMARIN – An immersive Exhibition you are represented with the animated video work THE DANCE FROM BELOW /BANHEIRA DE GESSO / NO ADVENTURE LAND (WMG). What relation does your work have to the theme of the Exhibition: “water”?

GABRIEL MASSAN: My research explores the performance of the organic through digital sculptures. The liquidity of movement in animation and the experimentation in habitat construction are influenced by the possible presence of water in these fictitious bodies and atmospheres. I also work with the development of fluids and watery surfaces that simulate rivers, lakes and seas, that devastate and/or bathe the lives I dedicate myself to imagine.

There is hardly a city like Venice that fits better to the theme of ULTRAMARIN: What is special for you about the lagoon city and what are you looking forward to the most?

I like the power that water exerts over the city, which defines precisely the way we enter and navigate this territory. The force of this existence that advances and advances over us and over our choices. Returning to Venice in the same year, but now rethinking its power and peculiarity is very significant for the work I have been developing as an artist.

What current developments in the field of digital art are you observing at the moment: which techniques do you already use, which innovations would you like to use (more) of, and how do technical developments influence your work?

My work takes shape digitally. My drafts are virtual. I start by using techniques in digital sculpture, digital painting and 3D animation. These compositions are firstly presented through video art and still images, like photographs. Then I explore augmented reality filters, proximity sensors, sound reaction and virtual reality. In the last two years I’ve been focusing on games and interactivity. The next step would be to integrate these environments with live simulations and mixed reality performances. The way I present my work defines the interpretations and impacts I will have on the public. Understanding what brings me closer and what pushes me away is crucial to develop a critique of the bridge between the different dimensions I explore.

Gabriel Massan, Germany 2021-2022

Animated Videos

These three extraordinary digital landscapes by Brazilian artist Gabriel Massan captivate the observer with their crystalline fleetingness and oscillating amorphous structures. Massan is a Brazilian-born digital artist who lives in Berlin, Germany. His research is developed by narratives, that work the relationship of dependence between fictional existences and digital environments, signifying the representations of color, identity and time.


Questi straordinari paesaggi digitali dell’artista brasiliano Gabriel Massan affascinano l’osservatore con la loro fugacità cristallina e le loro strutture amorfe oscillanti. Massan è un artista digitale di origine brasiliana che vive a Berlino, in Germania. La sua ricerca si sviluppa attraverso narrazioni che lavorano sul rapporto di dipendenza tra esistenze fittizie e ambienti digitali, dando luce alle rappresentazioni del colore, identità e tempo.

 

The Dance From Below

Brazil, 2021
Animated video, 1:47 min., color, no sound, loop

Banheira de Gesso

Germany, 2021
Animated video, 1:00 min., color, no sound, loop

No Adventure Land (WMG)

Germany, 2022
Animated video, 0:20 min., color, no sound, loop

 

Kindly supported by DKB

Alexander Reben, Italy 2022

AI-generated painting

A thought-provoking commentary on the role of emergent technologies and human-AI collaboration within contemporary art-making by Alexander Reben. The artwork is the direct result of Reben’s experimentations in human-machine collaborations at the forefront of AI technology. The series presents a number of images generated by an AI, which are based on the description of the painting created by another AI. The artist chose which outputs from the AIs were given to the curator, who then selected the final artwork to be painted by an artisan and shown in the exhibition. Reben is an artist and MIT-trained roboticist whose work probes the inherently human nature of the artificial.  He is interested in exploring the potential of AI as a creative partner and in the way that it can challenge the traditional ideas about creativity and art.

 

Una stimolante discussione realizzata da Alexander Reben sul ruolo delle tecnologie emergenti e della collaborazione tra intelligenza artificiale e uomo nell’ambito della produzione artistica contemporanea. L’opera è il risultato diretto delle sperimentazioni di Reben sulle collaborazioni tra uomo e le più sviluppate tecniche di intelligenza artificiale. La serie presenta un numero di immagini generate da un dispositivo di IA, che si basano sulla descrizione del dipinto creata da un’altra IA. L’artista ha scelto quali output delle IA consegnare al curatore, che ha poi selezionato l’opera finale che è stata dipinta da un artigiano ed esposta in mostra. Reben è un artista e robotista formatosi al MIT, la cui ricerca prova la natura intrinsecamente umana dell’artificiale. Reben è interessato ad esplorare il potenziale dell’intelligenza artificiale come partner creativo ed il modo in cui può sfidare le idee tradizionali sull’arte e sulla creatività.

 

Italy, 2022

 

Presented in partnership with Gazelli Art House

ULTRAMARIN in Hamburg


That was ULTRAMARIN” in Hamburg 

ULTRAMARIN – An Immersive Exhibition” at Tom Reichstein Contemporary Gallery on June 2 and 3, 2022 exceeded our expectations: Thank you to all visitors who provided a unique atmosphere. For all those who could not come we uploaded a few impressions and a short trailer of this immersive exhibition.

So that’s it? Of course not! We continue our journey… We are happy to announce that “ULTRAMARIN – An Immersive Exhibition” will be shown from September 1st to 8th in the context of the Venice Film Festival and the Venice Art Biennale at the Tana Art Space in Venice. Hardly any other city is more fitting when it comes to the theme of water, right? We are at least a bit excited to present ULTRAMARIN in bella Italia.




ULTRAMARIN – An Immersive Exhibition” lets you dive into the deep blue and presents international artworks around the theme “water”. Whether with Virtual or Augmented technology, mixed media or projection mapping – our international ensemble of artists is guaranteed to amaze you.

Among others, Manuel Rossner will be present with his sculpture Surprisingly Blue #2 and the specially developed virtual adaptations as NFTs. The shooting star of the digital art scene Jakob Kudsk Steensen shows his VR work Liminal Lands. With the kind support of the Québec Government Office in Germany and the Senate Chancellery Hamburg, Olivia McGilchrist shows her work MYRa: Underwater worlds meet performance art here as well, 360° videos and 3D animations catapult you into a virtual tidal wave.

In addition, Adrien M & Clarie B (Acqua Alta), Can Büyükberber (Primordial Force), Mélodie Mousset (Jellyfish), Joey Bania (Oceanic Feeling) and Christoph Monchalin (Muted) present their VR artworks and show their perspective on the wet element!

But that’s not all: We are going on tour with ULTRAMARIN! First stop is in September in Venice in the context of the Venice Art Biennale and Venice Film Festival, more stops will be announced here soon.

We are looking forward to seeing you!


XR History Award 2022


In cooperation with Körber-Stiftung, we are launching the XR History Award this year! The winning project using immersive technology to bring history, history education and commemorative culture to life will be rewarded with 5,000 euros.

Unbelievable more than 80 projects from Germany, Ukraine and 20 other countries applied following our Open Call!
Our international jury of VR experts will decide who will take home the prize.

We are especially happy to present you this year’s laudator:. The journalist with historical instinct Joachim Telgenbüscher (Twitter: @drguidoknapp) is head of the history department at Gruner & Jahr and will announce the winner of the XR History Award.

Initiated by Körber-Stiftung and VRHAM!


VRHAM! supports Ukraine


We have had a partnership with the two Ukrainian institutions “Academy of Visual Arts Kharkiv” and “Docudays UA” in Kyiv since 2020. In view of the disturbing political developments and the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, we are intensifying our contact, trying to find ways to support Ukrainian artists and to offer them a platform. We are therefore especially delighted that Oksana Syhareva from the Academy of Visual Arts Kharkiv is this year’s jury member of the “XR History Award”!


Fiona Fritz is a historian and program manager for eCommemoration in the History and Politics Department of the Körber-Stiftung. Since 2018 she has been designing and coordinating international history policy projects and digital formats for young Europeans at the Körber-Stiftung. We spoke with her about the challenges of digitization and the XR History Award.

VRHAM!: Dear Fiona, the Körber-Stiftung is committed to international understanding and a vibrant civil society. What role does the keyword “digitalization” play in this context?

FIONA FRITZ: As the Körber-Stiftung, our mission statement is “Making society better. This also applies to digitization, which is already permeating and changing almost all areas of society. Many of the Körber-Stiftung’s programs therefore deal specifically with the effects of digitization on civil society, for example with hate speech on the net against local politicians, but also with strengthening the digital skills of children and young people.

In our area of history and politics, we are primarily concerned with the aspect of international understanding, which is made easier by global networking. In the digital realm, national borders no longer play a role in direct exchange, while national echo chambers remain stable in the discussion of history. At the same time, conspiracy myths and historical distortion are spreading faster than ever. This is precisely where we come in with our programs in the field of history and politics.

You are the program manager of the Körber-Stiftung’s eCommemmoration project – what is the goal of your work?

Our program eCommemoration is about history and memory in digital formats, in games, social media and extended reality. New technologies and new generations raise new questions about history. How can we use digital opportunities to create a multi-voiced and relevant memory practice? With eCommemoration, we connect actors across borders and disciplines who are engaged with history. With our eCommemoration Convention, we bring together historians, museum makers, developers, and creatives from around the world to explore, discuss, and create history and memory in games, social media, and extended reality.

We also produce our History & Politics podcast, in which we talk with guests from a variety of backgrounds about why history is always the present, and how looking back helps us to understand it better.

What challenges do you face in your work to think history and memory digitally?

Just in the last few months, with the Russian war against Ukraine, we have had to learn quite massively that history is an extremely powerful tool that is too often manipulated. That’s exactly why we initiated the XR History Award together with VRHAM!. We want to promote creative projects that use exciting virtual, augmented or mixed reality technologies to broaden our view of history and thus create new approaches. That’s why it’s important to us that with the XR History Award we can honor a project that tells fact-based stories about the past in new formats.

In our work, it is particularly important to us to bring together people from the most diverse backgrounds and countries. This is the only way we can break down prejudices against “dry history” or new digital formats. History takes place in the digital realm, whether we as a society like it or not. That’s why it’s important to us to take games and extended reality seriously as cultural assets, but at the same time to question them critically. And above all, not just to talk about the formats, but to actually try them out: Gaming and immersion, and really experiencing what the potentials, but also the limits, are in the digital.

As part of the exhibition “ULTRAmarin – An immersive Exhibition”, VRHAM! in cooperation with the Körber-Stiftung is presenting the XR History Award – more than 80 works were submitted, which you evaluated as part of the jury. What was particularly important to you in selecting the winner?

We had a really great international and interdisciplinary jury that brought together expertise from the VR field, media science, but also history. As a historian, it was particularly important to me that it was not a purely fictional story, but that it was based on real and comprehensible sources or eyewitness accounts and did not falsify history.

It was equally important to us that the project find a creative approach and show new perspectives through an artistic view. I was really excited by the submissions, because they show how vivid history and memory are in the field of extended reality. The project that we are now honoring with the XR History Award is, in my view, special in terms of the concrete stories that are told. At the same time, it serves as a model of what engagement with, or even reconciliation with, contested history can look like.

In the VR film Child of Empire, two contemporary witnesses from India and Pakistan tell their stories of escape after the violent partition in 1947. The narratives of the two protagonists are not dominated by the hatred that still too often defines the relationship between India and Pakistan today. Thus, Child of Empire overcomes the tendency to create a hierarchy of victims by placing the two narrated stories on equal footing.

Berlin-based artist and curator Manuel Rossner’s work explores the fluid transitions of analog and digital reality. At the German premiere of ULTRAMARIN, which we at VRHAM! are presenting as an umbrella brand, he will be showing his SURPRISINGLY SERIES. We talked to him about challenges and the potential of digital, NFTs and new possibilities in the art world.

VRHAM!: Your art form moves between the worlds of traditional and digital art. In an interview with Tilman Baumgärtl, you said: “My art begins where architects leave off. What are the biggest challenges in trying to link analog with virtual reality?

MANUEL ROSSNER: Often, the two worlds function in opposite ways. For example, in the digital world, the term “expensive” means that a process consumes a lot of computing capacity, while in the case of a building, it costs a lot of money to build. In addition, the network culture is completely different. It’s always a challenge to create a digital experience. It starts with basic interactions: How do I move through space?

You are one of the first artists to explore the vast possibilities that NFTs offer. What distinguishes your personal work as an NFT artist?

I see my NFTs as part of a world that I create and continue to develop. For me, fundamental questions are important: What actually is a digital object? And how does it relate to a physical object? For example, my SURPRISINGLY SERIES consists of 100 digital works that I create in virtual reality. I draw in the air and the computer gives volume to my movement. 25 of these digital objects are precisely produced in the physical world by a CNC-mill.

For people who are not yet fully aware of the connection between art and NFTs, how would you describe this art form and what possibilities do you see in it?

The analog art world has opened up to the digital only to a very limited extent for decades. Without physical objects, there has hardly been any. But the great potential of the digital lies precisely in its independence from the physical. Now artists can not only exploit these possibilities, but also let visitors or collectors participate in their work in a new way.

At VRHAM! you present your work “Surprisingly” – What can visitors expect?

In the SURPRISINGLY SERIES, I’m interested in looking at my digital work from many angles: Visitors can see the original work with their smartphone in augmented reality. In addition, there are three videos to watch that show the different materialities: Bouncy, Dripping and Cracking. There is also a physical work to see.

Deutsche Kreditbank (DKB) continues its commitment to VRHAM! Festival as a partner again this year. We pick up the conversation from DKB Finanzwissen with Anne Schwanz. Anne is co-founder of the gallery Office Impart, which sees itself as a platform for contemporary art. She is also co-founder of the research initiative Art+Tech Report, which looks at the interface between art, market and technology. In this interview with DKB, she talks about the digitization of art, NFTs and the opportunities for the art market, among other topics. We think: A great insight that we want to share with you!

DKB Finanzwissen: In addition to the art trade, artworks are also becoming increasingly digital. How can we imagine a digital work of art and what forms can it take?

ANNE SCHWANZ: (…) Digital art can be anything created digitally or where digital technologies are the tools. It can take many forms: from a jpg file to a website, algorithmic programs, virtual reality representations to a video game. There are almost no limits to creativity.

DKB: What do you think distinguishes digital from analog art?

I don’t really see any difference. With a good work of art, the artistic concept is the most important thing. A digital work of art exists in digital space. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. The way it is perceived is just different, and you have to get involved with that. For example, you experience an immersive work of art that you can enter and that works with sound and light in a completely different way than a small drawing. (…)

DKB: Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a hype topic right now. What opportunities do NFTs offer for the art trade?

The big opportunity I see is that digital art will become more visible as a medium and more directly tradable through developments in blockchain technology. Through NFTs, the idea of digital ownership is once again brought into focus. This will play a major role in the future as more and more takes place in the digital space. (…). But despite all the hype, in the long run it will be primarily about quality, and only that will prevail. Those who collect art NFTs usually do so with a similar motivation as traditional collectors.

Want to read more from Anne? Here you can find the entire interview with further exciting insights on art, market and digitalization. Shout out to Anne and DKB for the exciting interview!

NFT – What? We asked ourselves the same question. Here you can find an introduction to the NFT business from DKB, a How-To (or a How-Not-To-Do) with all the important facts. Have fun!

Quirin Krumbholz, Austria 2022

Sculpture

fluid bodies are physical entities reflecting liquid states of matter floating in thin air. As ‘fluid bodies’ are physical sculptures, their synopsis is created through mental associations by the observer.

Manuel Rossner, Germany 2020-2022

Hand-drawn 3D paintings

The series SURPRISINGLY by Manuel Rossner comprises 100 unique, hand-drawn 3D paintings, each of which is available as an NFT. Rossner uses virtual reality glasses to create the shapes that refer to the classic format of portrait painting. The 3D models in this series have a physical counterpart in form of a sculpture and also exist in multiple variations, playing with different states of aggregation. Together, they represent Rossner’s research into the materiality of the digital. The physical paintings were part of recent exhibitions at Hamburger Kunsthalle and KÖNIG GALERIE/Berlin.

 

Kindly supported by