Fellows

Aarti Sunder is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s AI Anarchies programme, starting her residency at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in January 2023.

Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India. She largely works with moving image, writing and drawing. Her interest lies within technology and our relationship with it, focusing on the study of digital infrastructure. So far she has been focusing on contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth and digital-terrestrial play.

Residency Project

During this fellowship I will look into another form of back-end investigation, where the source and pathways of our internet, the ecosystem within which it operates and the life-forms that live around it are put into focus: submarine cables that carry the world’s data, materiality, connection and abstraction. How does data travel? Who and what does it meet on the way? Where do these conduits lie? The exploration rests on underlining the immense importance of submarine cables as historical conduits of power, resource allocation, distribution, labour, and layers of invisibility.

D’Andrade and Walla Capelobo are fellows of Akademie der Künste’s AI Anarchies programme, starting their residency at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in January 2023.

D’Andrade is a non-binary musician, poet and writer, currently enrolled in the master’s programme “Art in Context” at Berlin University of the Arts. D’Andrade’s conceptual approach is oriented toward Afro-futurism and decolonial theory, the development of investigative works and new and counter-narratives through sound design, coding, archives, and interactions. The artist co-curated the interdisciplinary festival “Jardim Suspenso” in Brazil and founded the solo project “Noise Vivarium” in 2020. D’Andrade’s works have been exhibited at Prater Galerie, nGbK, Iwalwahaus, and the AKE ARTS & BOOK FESTIVAL in Nigeria, among other venues.

Walla Capelobo holds a master's degree in Contemporary Art Studies from the Federal Fluminense University. She sees herself as a dark forest and fertile mud, as Transfeminist and anti-colonial. Her work as researcher and artist is characterised by the embodiment of life and regeneration. Walla Capelobo is the pedagogical coordinator of the Desculonizacion platform: "action and thought" (Mexico-Brazil). She also collaborates in CIPEI - Círculo Permanente de Estudios Independientes (Mexico-Brazil), a platform for research into counter-pedagogies and counter-visualities.

Residency Project

D'Andarde: During my residency, I will design, compose and write about multidimensional communities, digital poetry, and music. The project "Ultrapoetry" presents an online exhibition, distributed into three parts: games, essays, and sonic fiction. It will be created within the Mozilla Hubs platform as an online laboratory to discuss the concept of the metaverse and multidimensional communities. Thereby aesthetically exploring the creation of 3D virtual worlds through a queer and anti-colonial perspective. The digital body of the project will merge into an online archive of radical thinkers around decolonial AI.

Walla Capelobo: During my residency, I will research and develop the theoretical approach of the project "Ultrapoetry", co-directing a program with invited artists from Latin America and diasporic backgrounds to contribute with thoughts, writing and talks around the decline of colonialism, climate crises, indigenous resistance, afro-transfeminism and technopoetics. Through the concept of Quilombismo, raised by Abdias do Nascimento philosophy, I will create a temporary digital quilombo inside of Mozilla Hubs, together with a diverse group of thinkers, visual artists and musicians discussing multidimensional communities, metaverse, and Afrofuturism.

FONGWILKE are fellows of Akademie der Künste’s Human-Machine Programme in 2022.

FONGWILKE is an artist duo composed of Laura Fong Prosper (Panama City) and Tin Wilke (East Berlin). Their work focuses on collective memory, digital syncretism and speculative imagery of counter-narratives. In their hybrid practice, they work at the intersection of organic material, analog found footage and new digital media within installations, virtual reality, video art and experimental film forms.

Laura Fong Prosper has an MFA in media art and design from the Bauhaus University Weimar and a film editing degree from the International School of Film and TV in San Antonio de los Banos, Cuba (EICTV). Tin Wilke studied art and media at the Berlin University of the Arts (Udk) and has a master’s degree in theatre with new media and interactivity from the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA) Buenos Aires. Tin Wilke forms part of the queer performance collective CC_Lab and is on the board of the association for social-ecological change (VSOW e.V.). They are both members of the Mkv Berlin Media Art Association (medienkunst e.V.).

Their work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Ruhrtriennale Essen, Goethe-Institut, Toronto, and the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo Montevideo to name only a few venues.

Residency Project

The artist-duo FONGWILKE is working on an artwork that combines 20th century analog 16mm film footage, artificial intelligence and biomaterials to facilitate worlds of imagination that transcend the exploitative structures and apocalyptic narratives of our time.

Natasha Tontey is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s Human-Machine Programme 2021.

Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer living and working in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding “manufactured fear”. Tontey observes possibilities of other futures projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions but the subtle and personal struggles of outcasted entities and beings. Her work has been shown at transmediale 2021 and Kyoto Experiment 2021 amongst others. In 2020 she received the HASH Award from ZKM and Akademie Schloss-Solitude.

Residency Project

Pedro Oliveira is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s AI Anarchies programme, who started his residency at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in July 2022.

Pedro Oliveira is a researcher, sound artist, and educator whose work seeks to dismantle the articulations of colonial (sonic) violence perpetrated on the borders of the EU. He holds a PhD from the Berlin Universitty of Arts (UdK).

Residency Project

During the residency I will develop a long-form, multichannel sound installation exploring the idea of "spectralization" of the (migrant) voice. The main driving force of this work is a lo-fi, analogue "reverse engineering" of the so-called "dialect recognition software" in use by the German migration authorities since 2017 for cases of undocumented asylum seekers. A publication will juxtapose the sound piece with added layers of both clarification and complication.

Petja Ivanonva is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s Human-Machine Programme in 2022.

Petja Rossenova Ivanova’s intersectional feminist and transdisciplinary practice combine biology, spirituality, computation and the poetic to promote the “poetic method” as a counterweight to the socially dominant “scientific method” of a capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy. The Berlin-based Bulgarian artist graduated in 2015 from the Berlin University of Arts in the Computational Art/Generative Art class. She runs Studio Poetic Futures & Speculative Ecologies (SPF) out of a little caravan and teaches speculative design at HAW Hamburg and, at times, at Linnaeus University in Växjo, Sweden.

Residency Project

Petja Ivanonva experiments with bioplastics and “wearables” – intelligent garments – and uses creative data processing to enable the female body and female sexuality to be experienced in a new way.

Sahej Rahal is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s Human-Machine Programme 2020.

Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. He weaves together fact and fiction to create counter-mythologies, which interrogate narratives that shape the present. This myth-world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI programs, which he creates by drawing on sources ranging from local legends to science fiction. By bringing these into dialogue with each other, Rahal creates scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks in our civilization. Rahal has participated in group and solo exhibitions, including the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, the MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne and CCA Glasgow. He received the Cove Park/Henry Moore Fellowship, the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship and, most recently, the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant in 2019.

Residency Project

Sara Culmann is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s AI Anarchies programme, who started her residency at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in July 2022.

Sara Culmann is a visual artist, who finished her studies at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Her research interests include game studies, the semantics of digital tools and media, and historical contexts and intersections. She reflects on the existential impact of the cult of progress, scientific knowledge and information bias in her work. She uses speculative narratives and works closely with cultural clichés and imprints as well as found content. Culmann is also a teacher of animation software at the Prague Media School, an educational institution that supports independent journalism in Eastern Europe.

Residency Project

Sarah Ciston is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s AI Anarchies programme, who started their residency at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in July 2022.

Sarah Ciston builds critical-creative tools to bring intersectional approaches to machine learning. Ciston is an AI Anarchies Fellow at the Akademie der Künste, a Mellon PhD Fellow in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California, and an associate researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, plus the author of “A Critical Field Guide to Working with Machine Learning Datasets” from the Knowing Machines research project. Ciston’s projects include an interactive database to “rewrite” the inner critic and a bot that tries to explain feminism to online misogynists. Sarah Ciston leads Creative Code Collective, a community for co-learning programming using approachable, interdisciplinary strategies.

Residency Project

For my residency I will extend my work on the Intersectional AI Toolkit, building on established but marginalised tactics to reshape and reimagine more ethical and equitable machine learning. I’ll implement the Intersectional AI frameworks developed during public zine-making workshops and collaborations into printed and interactive publications, plus develop prototypes for anarchist AI–tangible, accessible tools that expose their own making and reveal their flaws. Together these tools and resources ask: Whose voices, visions, and stories are captured by automated systems? Whose are excluded, harmed, or undermined? And how can AI systems be truly for anyone to engage and intervene in?

SONDER are fellows of Akademie der Künste’s AI Anarchies programme, starting their residency at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in January 2023.

SONDER is an amoebic company, offering tools to refine conflicts. We intervene in public spaces and discourses with obstacles and counter-narratives, aiming to expose questionable developments hiding in normality. We substitute parts of the scenery to create situations against expectations.

Peter Behrbohm is a Berlin-based artist and architect. Individually as well as in collective constellations, he explores future conflicts and speculative societies, designs operative obstacles and installs counter-institutions. His works are surgical interventions in public spaces, routines and discourses, in which he implants parallel realities that are subsequently colliding with everyday life. Among others, he received the "BDA-SARP-AWARD" by the Association of German Architects, the "Elsa Neumann Stipendium" (2016) or the "MAK Schindler Stipendium Los Angeles" (2019).

Anton Steenbock works deal with capitalism as a sculptural force and the question of how increasingly complex economic structures affect and sustainably shape nature and society. His interventions consist of fake architecture projects, showrooms and widely spread advertisement campaigns. Thereby aiming to trigger political consciousness for urban and environmental changes as well as enterprise acquisitions in public spaces like Google street view and sharing economy apps such as Uber, Coop, and AirBnB.

Residency Project

"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the day capitalism ends", someone once said. We believe this day won‘t be a revolution but the introduction of an irresistible new platform. total.earth is both, a start-up as well as an all-over sharing platform heralding the final stage of sharing economy and platform capitalism. Its aim is to unify all aspects of life in a single app, making the whole world accessible to its customers. Once registered, everything will be free of charge. Instead considered a relic from the past, any possession is strictly prohibited and all available data will be processed and distributed by the company and its omniscient AI.