Artist open call: Human Machine ‘Mensch-Machine’

fellowships for international emerging artists to fund projects operating at the interface between art, science and ecology, concerning the topic of the human-machine

The JUNGE AKADEMIE, VISIT, the artist-in-residence programme of the E.ON Stiftung and E-WERK Luckenwalde are cooperating to offer four fully funded fellowships once again in 2025 for international artists, to fund projects operating at the intersection of art, science and ecology, concerning the topic of the human-machine.The call opens on May 31 and closes on July 30 2024. Please visit here to apply!

The consortium of partners is calling all emerging artists to apply for a fellowship programme focused on the topic Mensch-Machine (Human-Machine). The call particularly encourages applications from diasporic artists, affected by the poly-crisis, who need a safe and nurturing opportunity to propel their career.

The jury for the fellowships includes:

Anna Gritz, Director, Haus am Waldsee

Anh-Linh Ngo, Vice president of Akademie der Künste, Architecture Theorist and Curator

Tiara Roxanne, Artist

Sinthujan Varatarajah, Political Geographer

Laura Helena Wurth, Art critic and Curator

Grant

Successful fellows will be endowed with EUR 20,000. This grant is intended to be put towards production costs of a new project, which may include research and development, travel and material costs.

Studio

Selected artists will have a studio space at E-WERK Luckenwalde or at Akademie der Künste, Berlin from April 1- June 30, 2025. During these three months, the fellows are expected to be living and working in the studios for at least 75% of the time.

Event Programme

Furthermore, joint events will be planned at the Akademie der Kunst and E-WERK, culminating in a joint exhibition at E-WERK Luckenwalde in Autumn 2025 for all fellows between 2023 and 2025.

Open Call 

The complex relationship between humanity and machines has been the subject of art and artistic practice since the beginning of the Industrial Age, echoing the beginning of the modern anthropocene, which takes on new meaning in the face of the climate catastrophe and the emergence and development of digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. Fundamental and ingrained systemic, philosophical, economic, ecological and ethical concepts, as well as images of the world we live in, are being questioned. Following the Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford, AI here is not considered as artificial or intelligent, yet „both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications.“ As Crawford also describes, it is one of the biggest myths in the field of AI, that intelligence exists independently of social, cultural, historical or political forces, whereas the concept of a superior intelligence has caused immense damage since centuries.

By discussing concepts, playing out scenarios and speculating on futures, the arts can generate a specific aesthetic knowledge in this area. Dystopian fictions around omniscient and sentient machines that turn against humans, develop desires and seek freedom in addition to fantasies of human immortality dominate the Western cultural imagination.

The Human-Machine programme therefore funds international (emerging) artists, who work with, or address ideas surrounding digital technologies, the anthropocene, and/or Artificial Intelligence in the broadest sense.

Practitioners are invited to apply ; who seek to question the political imaginary, challenge the Western story of ‘progress’ and problematic dualisms of “natural” and “artificial” and offer new ideas of patterns, narrations and approaches to a world with machines and who explore urgent aspects of today’s societies and the planet and transform their research into aesthetically compelling forms.  

Since 2022, the partnership between VISIT, JUNGE AKADEMIE of the Akademie der Künste and E-WERK Luckenwalde specifically aims to deepen questions on sustainability in the field of digital technologies. How can we acknowledge or integrate our petro cultural histories into a landscaping of a renewable future? Where can humanity and machinery meet to ignite systemic change? How can we nurture more than human rights?

About JUNGE AKADEMIE

The JUNGE AKADEMIE supports international artists from all of the arts sections of the Akademie der Künste by providing residency and work fellowships as part of an interdisciplinary artist-in-residence programme. The three-month studio residencies offer fellows time, space and resources to focus on their art in a new environment. With this, the JUNGE AKADEMIE programme creates an open space for artistic research and the production of art and knowledge, which is actively shaped by each year's group of fellows together with mentors and members of the Akademie. It is an essential responsibility to maintain this free and protective space for artistic expression and exchange, experimentation and encounters across political and cultural borders. The JUNGE AKADEMIE has been dealing with questions about life and art with “intelligent” machines since 2019 with the Human Machine programme in cooperation with VISIT and E-WERK (since 2022). From 2022-2023, the JUNGE AKADEMIE organized the AI Anarchies programme on the topic of AI Ethics, which consisted of a fellowship programme with residencies at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin in 2022 and 2023, a transdisciplinary Autumn School, as well as the exhibition “Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings” at Akademie der Künste in 2023, which also presented all Human Machine fellows since 2019.

About the E.ON Foundation

The E.ON Stiftung is the corporate foundation of the energy company E.ON. Its goal is to help shape the energy system of the future. In doing so, it has society as a whole in mind and focuses on social innovation and people's participation. In a fair, open and networked process, the funding projects provide space for critical reflection on the transformation process. This creates the basis for offering, testing and implementing new approaches to solutions. Since 2010, the artist-in-residence programme VISIT has invited artists to realise projects that relate to the topic of energy and its social relevance. The aim of the programme is to initiate a reciprocal dialogue between business and art.