On the occasion of the exhibition “Troika. Buenavista,” the SCHIRN hosted a panel discussion on April 8, 2025 about the intersections of virtual and real visual worlds. Prof. Annette Urban conducts research on mediated spatial relations and networked as well as virtual lifeworlds – we asked her 5 questions in advance.

Since 2023 Annette Urban is a professor of modern and contemporary art history with a focus on new media at the Institute of Art History at Ruhr University Bochum. Her research explores media-related spatial references, networked image worlds, and virtual life worlds.

1.

SCHIRN: Starting with virtual reality headsets, AI chatbots, and gamification all the way to AI integrations for military purposes: the virtual is increasingly interwoven with world affairs. In which area would you consider the merging of virtual and real lifeworlds to be especially positive or productive, and in which problematic?

AU: 

In the Collaborative Research Center “Virtual Lifeworlds” in Bochum, where I am currently working with colleagues from media, literary, and educational studies among others, we attempt to focus on the entanglements with that virtuality which is no longer primarily spectacular today but has long since become mainstream or normal. In doing so, we initially set aside the major promises of the future and dystopias. Our attention thus shifts not only to world events at large, but above all to the immediate lifeworld and our everyday, bodily mediated relations to the world. Nevertheless, this does not release us from the responsibility of critically accompanying this development toward a hybrid reality—both virtual and physical—and of working on alternative design options, not least from the side of art. For, as the philosopher Hans Blumenberg notes, the “lifeworld-ification” of technology also means the reverse: that it has become an unquestioned matter of course—something that must once again be opened up, alienated, and thus made questionable.

If we consider exemplary fields of application, constant ambivalences become especially evident: AI not only causes great injustice through racial profiling (Police stop-and-search practices that are based, among other things, on skin color), but it can also support the evaluation of immense quantities of child pornographic material that overwhelm human resources. Virtual reality is not solely associated with the escapism we often link to computer games, which—with the recent hype around permeable mixed-reality headsets—promise to bring an entire metaverse of entertainment and shopping opportunities into our living rooms. Conversely, VR proves to be a tool that can be useful in designing dementia-sensitive living environments. Or it appears as a double-edged well-being tool that, especially through depictions of nature—such as those that interest Troika—possesses both healing effects and the potential to intensify pressures of self-optimization.

2.

SCHIRN: Troika’s “Buenavista” shows a Kuka robot in an ever-changing environment based on digitized and digital landscape depictions and elements (assets) from video games. What interests you about this video work?

AU: What strikes me as fascinating about this panoramic video, first of all, its protagonist known from other works. Through its form—made solely of swirling hair—the robot is almost unrecognizable and here enters into a close interplay with the surrounding pageant of landscape imaginations. Troika plays a multilayered game in which an industrial robot, typically trained for production processes, is fed with movement data from ritual dances. The very working arm is thus animated—through algorithmic control—into spiritual ecstasy and union with nature, something that actually springs from a human longing to step outside the constraints of the body. Yet this kind of symbiosis is only partially provided by the beautiful landscape of “Buena Vista,” whose backdrop constantly changes, synthesizing various fragments of a clean, computer-game-style nature.

In the animation, Troika refrains from the perfection with which computer-generated environments usually merge diverse assets into a highly consistent, interactive world. For instance, the moving hair sometimes behaves inconsistently with the environmental influences in the image. Even so, a momentary harmony emerges between rhythmically shifting vegetation and the musically underscored circling of the solitary robot—one that captivates us as viewers almost physically.

Such works do not primarily guide us in deciphering virtual and real elements, even though such differentiating ability and media-competent handling of AI images are today of utmost importance in many areas of life. Rather, the exhibition puts us on the trail of what artificial intelligence can imply: not only that it processes data much faster and learns autonomously, but also that it enables the transfer of movements from human to artificial beings. When the latter begin to imagine their own harmony with their environment—as suggested by the endless landscape transformations reminiscent of autonomously processing image generators—human viewers remain in a state of enthralled stillness.

3.

SCHIRN: Artworks such as Troika’s “Irma Watched over by Machines” or “Ultra Red, Evergreen, Ocean Blue” make the color filter arrangement typical of digital images—red, green, and blue—visually tangible. What role can art play in our engagement with new technologies, and what role can it not?

AU: The example of the color filters that Troika uses as film on windowpanes for “Ultra Red, Evergreen, Ocean Blue” at various exhibition venues illustrates art’s potential very well: it possesses a great capacity for abstraction in a classic sense familiar from painting, and in doing so it simultaneously performs an aestheticization that can pave a transition into our built and atmospherically experienced lifeworld. This offers a significant means of easing what is often a challenging access to art that deals with our digital present.

A fundamental defamiliarization of the familiar—such as the strongly monochrome exhibition spaces in Troika’s installations—can sharpen our awareness of the relativity of both technologized and supposedly “natural,” human-constructed modes of perceiving the world. The three colors red, green, and blue refer to the RGB color space as a principle of additive color mixing through light, as well as to the Bayer filter that makes color perception possible in digital image sensors. The dominant, at times toxic green that also characterizes “Irma Watched over by Machines”—Troika’s pixel-like painting series based on digital surveillance images of Hurricane Irma—corresponds to the disproportionate relevance of this color tone for the human eye, whose perception of brightness and sharpness is largely governed by the green component in gray. In other works, such as at the climax of the video “Terminal Beach,” Troika uses red and pink tones to highlight the specific “vision” of photosynthesis-driven plants by inverting the part of the light spectrum they absorb.

It is no coincidence that the general focus has shifted from the long-privileged visual toward so-called sensing media, which—as demonstrated by the eponymous research group in Potsdam—must be acknowledged as possessing their own sensitivity and knowledge production. This touches upon the technical nature of sensor media embedded in most digital devices, which are often initially imageless. At the same time, it refers to the broad sensory spectrum possessed by technical, animal-plant, and human systems alike—one that can generate experiences of estrangement as well as kinship. This is precisely where artists intervene.

 

4.

SCHIRN: How does our digital reality change the working methods of artists like Troika? Are there artistic practices that can be considered characteristic of art at the interface of digital technologies?

AU: Troika’s example is telling of how artistic engagement with new technologies can connect, beyond their direct application, with other practices of both artistic and non-artistic provenance. In exhibitions such as their recent ones in Frankfurt or Neuss, we find classical artistic genres like painting and sculpture, which in turn reveal affinities to the digital—whether in the aforementioned painting series “Irma Watched Over by Machines” through mathematical rasterization and numerical decomposition of color values, or in the sculpture series “Compression Loss” through 3D printing, which enables a human-animal hybridization of digitized masterpieces of historical sculpture.

Equally characteristic is the strong entwinement with research practices, which allow Troika to immerse themselves in the nature of technical, scientific, and human history in order to retell it—using salt/silicon, for example, from flint to microchip—and often to underpin it with techno-euphoric or dystopian science fiction narratives. This reflects a tendency toward “fictioning,” which can also be observed in the visual arts: recurring protagonists are equipped with an entire world in all its depth, including its myths, its respective past, and its future. This expresses a form of worldbuilding that has migrated from its traditional domains, such as video games, into contemporary art. As with Troika, this can happen in the genuinely artistic medium of the exhibition, which in its own way evokes an atmosphere and an artificial environment as a second nature (in philosophy, this denotes a sphere created by humans that here, however, has already become posthuman). Equally important are artistic approaches that design virtual worlds directly using 3D design and on corresponding platforms. In short, what is characteristic is the diversity.

5.

SCHIRN: Art often engages in utopian or dystopian visions of the future. Is there an artistic future scenario—positive or negative—that seems especially realistic to you?

AU: As indicated above, with regard to the entanglements of virtual and “real” spaces, it is not only the future that interests me; the present itself is already rich. At the same time, art is expected to provide visions and creative freedom in design—something that touches upon AI’s ability to model data for predicting future scenarios. In Troika’s painting series or in their video “Terminal Beach,” machine vision appears conspicuously indifferent to natural disasters favored by human-driven climate change or to the fall of the last tree under the blow of a robot creature. In the works just mentioned, the trio of artists links the present to a past thousands or even millions of years distant through salt/silicon. This de-centers the still prevalent anthropocentrism, which Troika counters with other intelligences—the intelligence of thistles as resilient species in “Anima Atman,” or, as Eva Wilson emphasizes in her text for the book “Untertage,” the intelligence of the inorganic, which extends into a world beyond the human.

I can scarcely involve myself in predictions about the likelihood of future technological scenarios. From an art historical perspective, however, it is instructive to look across the last 30 years at how media artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson have imagined futurity through the seduction of a female cyborg. In the present, Yael Bartana, for example, created in the German Pavilion in Venice a vision of leaving Earth in favor of a second artificial world in space, conjured solely through the light effects of a rotor, a film, and a dome projection, whose inhabitants we encountered, among other things, as AI-generated faces. Today, the often intertwined techno-utopias and dystopias—particularly concerning AI—seem to lean toward the latter. Rarely is the algorithmically controlled robot arm, which marks a turning point toward a posthuman world in Troika’s work, embedded in such a co-creative partnership as in the drawing performances of Sougwen Chung.

Nevertheless, there are artistic projects that connect the digital present with visions of a better life. Often, dominant technologies are repurposed—despite the increasingly rigid presets of tech corporations—and adapted to the needs of specific communities.

Buenavista,
SCHIRN Kunsthalle,
6 March — 30 April 2025

*