In cooperation with E-WERK Luckenwalde and the VISIT program of the E.ON Foundation, the JUNGE AKADEMIE is awarding a further four scholarships per year for 2024 and 2025 for international up-and-coming artists from all art disciplines on the subject of “Man-Machine”. The scholarship program serves to promote projects at the interface of art, science and ecology; the focus of the current call is on the artistic approach to questions of sustainability in the field of digital technologies, in particular artificial intelligence. The scholarships are worth 20,000 euros incl. project funds. Studios are available for the four scholarship holders at E-WERK Luckenwalde and the Akademie der Künste in the Hansaviertel.
The complex relationship between man and machine has been the subject of art and artistic practice since industrialization. With digitalization, but also with the climate emergency, the topic has become more explosive, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. Fundamental philosophical, economic, ecological and ethical concepts and ideas about the world we live in are called into question. With Kate Crawford, AI is not understood here as “artificial” or “intelligent”, but “embodied and material, made of natural resources, fuels, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, history(ies) and classifications”. As Crawford also writes, one of the biggest myths of the AI industry is that intelligence exists independently of social, cultural, historical and political forces, yet the concept of “superior” intelligence has been causing immense damage for centuries.
The “Man-Machine” program promotes international artists from all artistic disciplines who deal with digital technologies and artificial intelligence in the broadest sense, who question in particular the Western history of progress and dualisms such as the “artificial” and the “natural”; who enable new patterns of thought, narratives and approaches to the world in the context of the topic and explore urgent aspects of the current situation of society and the planet.
Application deadline: July 31, 2024