How does one find a place of which you don't know if it exists? When looking for information online, you are probably most familiar with finding such using a search engine but the search is only as successful as you make it. It largely relies on how much you already know beforehand. The project marks an exploration into search engines that are not limited by language and into finding information without prior knowledge. 

Most of our evolutionary history has been spent in nature, resulting in an innate love of natural settings. Humans also have a compulsion to leave tracks across this earth and discovering previously unknown places offers the possibility of making a mark on history. A land surrounded by water is perceived as the perfect place for utopian experiments and paradise on earth. 

With our haptic search engine, we are giving users the opportunity to shape landmasses like a god. While shaping the sand, a camera captures the outlines of the given body, matching it in realtime with 75,000 satellite images of islands all over the planet. As you transform the shape, the machine doesn't stop comparing, constantly returning its findings in realtime. 

Find your perfect holiday setting, the island of your dreams.

The project was realized in collaboration with Vinzenz Aubry.

https://vinzenzaubry.com/

Unknown Territories – Searching for Islands

With everything happening in the world right now, the question of how bad things might get has become increasingly urgent.
We're inching towards a crisis and one of the questions that has been lingering for a while is whether technology will be our saviour or our demise. But technology is only an expression of our humanity. With the computer as with any tool, the concept and direction must come from the man – this morphs the initial question: Are humans going to kill themselves?

The Doom-Monger is an entity that predicts disaster.

When watching the news we're conditioned to seeing other people because we want to know how they're dealing with the situations at hand, but the Doom-Monger removes all humans from his vision. 

With him, the backstage becomes the spectacle. You're given impressions of a foreseen future that resemble déjà vus; these images refer to events that never happened and never will, even though the spoken word suggests otherwise. He's showing us the world without present tense.They are images of our imagined future once the collapse is upon us.

Even though a lot of horrible things are happening right this moment, this work is a poetization of the present through the assertion of future asymmetry and asynchronicity.

TL;DR: The Doom-Monger removes humans from selected live video news broadcasts by means of machine learning all the while keeping the original audio intact.

The shown broadcasts are by Fox News and ABC News Australia from February 10th 2020.

Doom-Monger was realized at the Berlin University of the Arts during the WS19/20 and shown at the end of semester exhibition in February.

Doom-Monger

Government-issued lockdowns have become standard procedure during the COVID-19 pandemic, clearly separating what is considered private and public space.

Defining space by dividing it to inside and outside is one of human's ways to recognize his position in environments, because we can only ever be either inside or outside, never neither of them. But there are spaces that actively divide these territories. Spaces of transition, boundaries and connections: in-between spaces. Here things meld together and cease to be distinct. Doors, windows, stairs and walls are at once neither and both.

By using the ever-present confinement of our homes as a challenge, I wanted to open up a space that was previously off-limits to the vast majority of the people in my surroundings: my private space.

"after hours" deals with human properties within machines.
Machines have always automated tasks humans didn’t or couldn’t do, and this one is no different. Through the extension of private space into public space and public space into private space, it has become a visualization of human desire for companionship during these trying times in isolation.

It is an open invitation returning every night as soon as the sun sets for anyone watching who might feel alone and hoping for another person waiting at the end of the rope. But it is still a machine extending this invitation, not a person, and it stays impossible to climb this ladder.

after hours

Self-destructive behavior is almost never intentional. In emotionally tumultuous situations where we resort to such actions, we leave behind all reason and buy into thinking that a self-destructive action benefits us. We consider it a short relief from turbulence we fell into.
An autoantibody works in a similar fashion. Like a bug in one's system, it is a type of antibody that is produced by an organism’s immune system to attack its own healthy tissue.
In a state of self-destruction, the balance sought is also a crisis of imbalance.

"autoantibodies" is a series of self-destructive stools, each connected to their own idiom on self-destruction:

am Ast sägen auf dem man sitzt
sawing the branch on which you're sitting

sich ein Bein ausreißen
tearing off a leg

sich wie ein Frosch aufblasen
puffing up like a froh

autoantibodies

Freud believed that there are two kinds of human instincts, one being the instinct of love and the other the instinct of death. The former is constructive, the latter destructive. 
He believed that people generally channel their death instincts outwards. Aggression, for example, arises from the death instincts.

"I am the spirit, ever, that denies!
And rightly so: since everything created,
In turn deserves to be annihilated: 
Better if nothing came to be.
So all that you call Sin, you see,
Destruction, in short, what you’ve meant
By Evil is my true element."
Mephistopheles in Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808)

Mephistopheles is a somewhat undefined character in Goethe's Faust. Void of a unique personality, his sole goal is the destruction of all that exists. As God's adversary he embodies the primal principle of Evil and persistently criticizes His summit of creation – Man. At the same time, he's a materialization of all destructive tendencies within Faust himself, and thus within all human beings. Yet through it all, he fails to realize that he too is nothing but a pawn in a higher being's game.

Mephista is a machine taking on a similar role. Another number in a line-up of machines built to embody human traits. Contrary to Mephisto, she has become frustrated over always being confronted with humans and their emotions, being nothing but a personification. Not capable of bringing herself to feel those same emotions of bliss and love – nor being allowed to – she is doomed to sit on the sidelines begrudging all happy couples she encounters. She's angered. Her coping mechanism sets in, she scours the web for pictures of happy couples and she starts snipping away.

Mephista

Many pacifistically inclined people would agree that in their own private utopias, weapons don't have any right to exist... and one of countless utopias circling within the heads of dreamers is that in which art is made for art's sake, not for it to be a tool to financially enrich people.

This installation is an attack on art dealers and collectors who manipulate modern art for profit, an attack on the commodification of art – tracking a loss of faith in existing structures.

Make Me A Weapon is also about the way objects define the space they occupy. An object of destruction was erected as an extension of this space as the mirror of a system speeding towards annihilation, turning itself into a quiet aggressor. It is not yet a weapon, rather still waiting to be activated.

What sets a real weapon apart from an artefact is whoever controls it. At the same time, this weapon-to-be is not captive to its environment, instead allowing anyone passing to control the next few seconds of the future of this space. By doing so, it also opens the question of why humans have a tendency to want to amplify certain actions even though it could mean that they themselves are potentially the ones getting hurt.

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Merani