Installation Durational performance. CLB. Berlin. 2022

 In the gallery two entities are facing each other. A female model, the

artist, siting still in a portrait pose on a chair. Opposite her is a ba ery of

3D printers. The machines are in the process of printing. The model is

surrounded by cameras continuously scanning her position, transferring

the information to the 3D printing program. The printing process takes

several days. Slight changes in the model’s position are inevitable. The

program challenges the printers to take the new information on the

position of the model, and integrate the emerging data into their

additive process of creation.

Machines possess the power of precision. Their superiority lies in the

precise manifestation of information. From machine-based factories and

unbeatable chess computers to lives lived in the never-ending outputs of

streaming services and the gaming industry, analogue reality is

increasingly challenged by the growth of the digital. It seems that the

necessity of the human is diluted, even to the point where creative

processes – the writing of poetry, the painting of original motifs in a

multitude of artistic styles – are made possible by machines. The cra  of

the artist appears almost obsolete.

This performative installation poses a classic challenge of art to the

machines: to create a sculpture of a live model in real time. By tasking

them to react spontaneously and  exibly to the information they receive,

it explores the relationship between creativity and failure. But in the

formal challenge lies a wider signi cance. Throughout art history the

(male) artist would sculpt/paint/use his muse/model. This aesthetic

constellation is integral to a culture that colonizes the land as much as it

colonizes the female body. With the rise of the machines and their entry

into the aesthetic realm the constellation has spread from the

interpersonal to the inter-species. When before there was a male gaze,

today there is also a machine gaze. Here, a (female) artist gives orders to

the machines to model her according to her own rules in search of a

feminine gaze. It is an act of uprising reclaiming aesthetic representation

against a tradition and its contemporary expression.