Fellows

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

Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India. She works with moving images, writing and drawing. Her interest lies within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics. Sunder has exhibited her work at the Singapore Biennale 22, 1ShanthiRoad Studio Gallery, HKW, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe-Institut, Kunstverein Leipzig, bauhaus imaginista, Alserkal Avenue, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has received grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Sarai and Khoj.

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 is a fellow 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 self-taught musician, poet and writer. Their conceptual approach is oriented towards Afro-futurism and blackness theory, as well as the development of investigative works, new and counter-narratives through sound design, coding and archives. They co-curated the interdisciplinary festival "Jardim Suspenso" in Brazil and founded the solo project "Noise Vivarium" in 2020. D’Andrades works have been exhibited at Prater Galerie, nGbK, Iwalwahaus, and the AKE ARTS & BOOK FESTIVAL in Nigeria amongst others.

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.

Laura Fong Prosper is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s Human-Machine Programme in 2022.

Laura Fong Prosper is a visual artist from Panama based in Berlin.

Her work addresses themes such as collective memory, ancestral imaginaries and eco-feminisms while interweaving video, analog film, new media and other materialities.

She studied film editing at the International School of Film and TV (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba and received an MFA in New Media Art from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. She also participated in fellowship programmes at the Kunsthochschule für Medien (KHM) in Cologne, Germany and Tongji University in Shanghai, China. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro; Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Panamá; Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin; Galerie im Turm Berlin, amongst others. She is a member of the Mkv Berlin Media Art Association (medienkunst e.V.).Tin Wilke is a fellow of Akademie der Künste’s Human-Machine Programme in 2022.

Residency Project

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.Natasha Tontey is an interdisciplinary artist based between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding “manufactured fear”. In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions but through the subtle and personal struggles of the outcasted entities and beings.

Her recent exhibitions include a solo show at Auto Italia, London, UK (2022) and selected group shows at Singapore Biennale (2022); Stroom Den Haag (2022); GHOST 2565, Bangkok, Thailand (2022); Protozone8 Queer Trust, Zurich, Switzerland (2022); Arko Art Council, Seoul, Korea (2022), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2022); transmediale, Berlin (2021); Performance Space 2021, Sydney; Other Futures, Amsterdam (2021); Singapore International Film Festival (2021), Kyoto Experiment 2021; Asian Film Archive, Singapore (2021). In 2020, she received the HASH Award from the ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and a residency at the 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 is committed to an anti-colonial study of listening and its intersections with violence at the European border. Currently, he is a research and arts fellow at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS). He holds a PhD from the Berlin University of the 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 Ivanova, born in Bulgaria, is an artist, lecturer and performer whose practice is framed by her “Studio for Poetic Futures and Speculative Ecologies”. Seeking to overcome the linear and binary thinking that technology carries, Petja introduces poetic, emotional, mycelial and psychic relations to the living world through Computational Art. She studied visual communication and computational/generative art at the Berlin University of Arts. Ivanova has taught speculative design at Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, where she received the 2021 Lecturer Award. Recent exhibitions include New Now Festival, 3hd Festival ‒ Echo Chambers and Our Data Bodies for transmediale Vorspiel in 2023.

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 Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Her research interests include game studies, semantics of digital tools and media, including historical contexts and intersections. In her work she reflects on the existential impact of the cult of progress, scientific knowledge and information bias. She uses speculative narratives and works closely with cultural clichés and imprints as well as found content. Sara 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 loves building tools to bring intersectional approaches to machine learning and building community through creative-critical coding. The artist is a Mellon PhD Fellow in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California and an associated 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. They also lead Creative Code Collective, a community for co-learning programming using approachable, interdisciplinary strategies. Ciston’s projects include a machine learning interface to “rewrite” the inner critic and a bot that tries to explain feminism to online misogynists.

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 who started their residency at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in January 2023.

Peter Behrbohm is a Berlin-based artist and architect. Through extensive research, he explores future conflicts and utopian societies, designs operative obstacles and installs counter-institutions. His works are surgical interventions in public spaces, routines and discourses, revealing the constructedness of reality. 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's 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 play with megalomaniacal architecture and urban development projects, commercial showrooms, and large-scale advertising campaigns to promote political awareness of urban and environmental changes, as well as the ongoing appropriation of public domains by enterprises like Google Street View and sharing economy apps such as Uber, Coop, and Airbnb.

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.

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.

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

Tin Wilke is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker from East Berlin whose work focuses on collective memory, dissident practice and speculative imagery of counter-narratives. Working mainly collaboratively at the intersection of digital new media, organic material and found footage within installations, gatherings, stages and experimental film, Wilke’s hybrid practice questions the binary and exploitative modes of production within patriarchal structures.

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) in Buenos Aires. Wilke forms part of the queer performance collective CC_Lab and is a board member of the association for social-ecological change (VSOW e.V.) as well as a member of the Mkv Berlin Media Art Association (medienkunst e.V.).

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.

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

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