Offerus Ablinger & Hidéo SNES
Curated by Marija Nujic
Artist-statements:
https://www.transmutation.online/contact/
The dichotomy of the lost paradise - a paradise that knows no progress and overcomes the disillusionment of modernity - drives the dream of the creative machine and makes it seem seductive. Because this is where first and second nature meet. More than that, the dream points beyond itself and evolves. Because it is about art, about the realm of signs and symbols, it develops into a grand narrative that builds on the fact that man and machine are no longer pacified. In the long run, the principle of opposites as such also disappears. Just as creativity as a guiding social value blurs the distinctions between top and bottom, marginality and significance, original and copy: The creative machine pushes toward a third instance of reality in which any clear boundary would be overcome. It is primarily this hope that makes the dream of the creative machine a dream of digital modernity, in which many spheres of life merge and the old thinking in strong distinctions, whether between the sexes, the genres of art, or between humans and other living beings, gives way to thinking in hybrid values. This hybridization has many dimensions and is usually accompanied by the ideal image of a new immediacy that bypasses any kind of intermediate instance.
While Offerus deals with the concept of the cyborg, an extension of the human being and his natural means, in Hidéo's work it is the idea of the art machine that extends traditional artistic creative processes. In this broad field of ethics and questions of the human and the mode of action of the Anthropocene, the artists* meet in the exploration of the Conditio Humana in the course of the formation of digital neo-modernity. To this end, they allow an artificial intelligence programmed by Hidéo to access Offerus' paintings, creating a new interface between man, machine, and expressive power.
