Birk Schmithüsen graduated from HGB Leipzig in February 2018. He studied in the Expanded Cinema class taught by Prof. Clemens von Wedemeyer.

 

Birk Schmithüsens work deals critically with emerging technologies. How do technologies that only a few humans understand affect our everyday lives? How can they be used in abstract aesthetic works and shown from another side? Schmithüsen uses computer vision, algorithms and machine learning for audiovisual objects, installations and performances. Being concerned about the lack of understanding for the way emerging technologies works, he opens up new perspectives on decision making processes of algorithms and machine learning. The perception of technological concepts in his works differ between provocative attitude, experimentally objective or abstractly aesthetic.

 

Text Source: artist website

 

 

The aesthetic experiment investigates the question of the nature of artificial intelligence in neural networks. They are ascribed with intelligent behavior because they can generalize learned rules and apply them to unknown data. The artist Birk Schmithüsen describes the reaction to unknown data as predictable unpredictability. In the experiment, the training process of an artificial neural network as well as the predictable unpredictability are audiovisually translated and thus intuitively experienced. Sounds serve as input data associated with images as output data. A spherical object makes the sound-image associations visible. It consists of a seemingly chaotic cluster of 13k LEDs in which readable patterns of light appear. The pixels are individually controllable mapped in three-dimensional space. The spatial positioning of the pixels in the virtual graphic space makes it possible to display volumetric shapes, patterns and structures. An obvious intelligence that manifests itself in a seemingly random structure.

Artist website: birkschmithuesen.com