Anja Engelke. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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Since the beginnings of photography, the medium has been repeatedly confronted with social and humanistic issues. Today, there are programs that generate images using Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on millions of images from the internet. The exhibition Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? builds on this technology while questioning AI in its role as “photographer”. Through the unreflective rearrangement of learned image patterns, AI exposes common stereotypes that are deeply rooted in society. Engelke is interested in which images and social structures become recognizable in the generated images.

The series The Falling Sodiers (2022) shown at Künstlerhaus Bethanien refers to the well-known photograph of a falling soldier taken by photographer Robert Capa in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Engelke used AI to generate several variants of the iconic photograph based on a found caption. The resulting work not only analyses human behaviour, but also questions the still unresolved question of whether Capa’s image is a staging.

Sleeping by the Dataflow (2023), the second work presented in the exhibition, quotes the series Sleeping by the Mississippi by the American photographer Alec Soth. Here, an AI wrote prompts based on Soth’s photographs. These prompts were used in a second step to generate images from them. Here, too, the twofold interpretation of Alec Soth’s images created by an AI exposes stereotypical social norms. In addition, the work raises the question of copyright in times of AI.