“Sunrise Over the Rocks of Kollnburg” is a 4×3 m outdoor mosaic created by the Hungarian painter Muzsa and H.E. Max Haarich. The work was commissioned by the village Kollnburg in the Bavarian Forrest. It shows a stylized sunrise on the facade of a historic building at the marketplace of Kollnburg. The glass mosaic incorporates the historic bricks and stones, which actually belong to the rock on top of which Kollnburg was erected.

The mosaic consists of more than 2,000 glass tiles, which were each cut and colored by hand.

Mosaic art is actually a predecessor of modern pixel art and it was a lot of fun to practice “pixeling” motifs by hand with the prepared glass tiles.

“Kollnburg Views” is a multimodal installation combining present sights with historic stories of Kollnburg. The installation consists of eight framed lenticular prints, hung in the forest of Kollnburg, waiting to be animated by the visitors. The prints show typical Kollnburg motifs in 3D and are connected with their digital counterpart via NFC chips. Visitors can see the digital animations on their smartphones and listen to audio recordings of Biebl Hermann, a true Bavarian Original, who is sharing invaluable stories and insights about his beautiful city.

The digital Kollnburg Views are stored permanently on the Tezos blockchain.

Wikipedia offers a List of Countries by External Debt. The strange thing is that every country is in debt. How is this possible? Where is all the money?

We, the Republic of Užupis, admit that we have all the money of the world and we will pay your debts. In order to free the world from financial chains, we started printing emergency money from our national currency UžEUR and started distributing it in Munich. The bank notes are left blank so that everyone can enter the amount they need in order to pay their share of their nations debts (between 0 and 846K EUR). This emergency money is a valid currency and 1 Už EUR (~ 4 EUR) will buy you one beer in Užupis.

The problem is that such a sudden and massive increase of liquidity would lead to a fatal inflation. We have seen this during and after the pandemic, when governments started printing money like there is no tomorrow. So in order to prevent the inflation, we restrict the validity of the money to 1 hour with no chance to reach Užupis within that time. Instead, we offered to invest the whole amount back into Užupis Treasury Bills with a value of Π thousand UžEUR each.

The treasury bills were handed out as digital certificates, which can be redeemed by the central bank, if you manage to find it.

This installation has been performed at Munich’s Galerie der KünstlerInnen and at Haus der Kunst. Within one hour, we created real valid money equivalent to several million EUR, and extracted it all from the market before it could hurt anyone.

Installation view of “Good Buy, Reality I” at Munich’s Kunstinsel (Photo: Jens Hartmann)

The virtualisation and commercialisation of our lives is increasingly advancing. Virtual reality technology enables more and more realistic immersion in digital worlds. At the same time, non-fungible token (NFT) technology suddenly allows everything to be turned into a digital item – from digital art to fragments of real skyscrapers. Virtual reality and NFT technology come together in the idea of the metaverses, which has been pushed forward with billions in budgets. Metaverses are customisable digital realities in which digital goods can be presented, traded and consumed in the form of NFTs.

“Good Buy, Reality!” marks the beginning of Munich’s digital sell-out into metaverses. Two 25m² fragments of our common everyday life were each photographically isolated, stored as NFTs on a public blockchain, and turned into trade goods for metaverses. The billboards on the art island show two NFT sales offers, which can be accessed via the QR link shown. The NFT offers each include the exact reality cutout that would be seen behind the billboard if it were not covered by the offer. However, the perspective of the digital sections of reality is distorted, so that they only match the analogue reality for a very short time from a certain point.

Against the background of increasing virtualisation and commercialisation of our lives, the cross-media installation “Good Buy, Reality!” invites us to appreciate shared reality. Two such small moments of reality are artificially created in order to threaten their sale at the same time. As long as this sale is not completed, however, the supposedly all-commercialising NFT platform functions as a community-promoting community archive. In this way, the art installation emphasises our often underestimated personal responsibility and power vis-à-vis new technologies.

The installation will be on view at Munich’s Kunstinsel at Lenbachplatz from 17 JAN to 15 MAR 2023.

www.publicartmuenchen.de

H.E. Max Haarich had the honor to be invited by the legendary love propagandists Rainer Langhans and Christa Ritter for an evening at Munich’s Import/Export. In an open discussion with the whole audience, they raised the question of how we are feeling and how our view on life itself is changing in these times of growing conflicts, where hatred and violence is presented as the only rational “solution”.

A recording of the discussion will be published soon.

Ambassador H.E. Haarich had the honor to present the story of the Republic of Užupis at TEDxROMA on 21 JAN 2023. In his talk, he demonstrated how the spirit of Užupis might contribute to more ethical AI and more kisses on planet earth. 1,100 guests attended the event at Parco della Musica as well as 2,000 online viewers.

The talk will be published by the end of February on www.tedxroma.com.

H.E. Max Haarich’s public art installation “Good Buy, Reality” will be on view at Kunstinsel at Munich’s Lenbachplatz from today until 15 MAR. Against the background of increasing virtualisation and commercialisation of our lives, the cross-media installation “Good Buy, Reality!” invites us to appreciate shared reality. Two such small moments of reality are artificially created in order to threaten their sale at the same time.

The project has been realized thanks to the generous support by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich.

Further info about Good Buy, Reality.

“Smart Hans” won the main jury prize of Augsburg’s renowned media arts festival Lab30. The jury consisting of Julia Holzmann, Andreas Muxel, Stefanie Sixt, Martin Spengler, and Karin Zwack highlighted the scientific rigor and social relevance as well as the intuitive accessibility of the interactive artwork.

“Smart Hans” is the artificially intelligent reincarnation of Clever Hans, the “mind-reading” horse that lived 100 years ago. The interactive installation shows an animated horse that can guess any number on your mind in real-time via posture recognition. This installation is fun to play with, but it is also a warning about public surveillance and automated decision making. Furthermore, the artwork is a literal manifestation of the Clever-Hans-Effect, which describes the core flaw of any AI model – the general impossibility to fully determine, on which data its decision was based.

During the four days of the Lab30 festival, “Smart Hans” was allowed to guess the number on the visitors’ minds more than 700 times. With a total amount of almost 200 correct guesses, our current AI model is performing significantly above chance. We are looking for partners to further train our models to hopefully reach an accuracy of 70 – 80 % like the original Clever Hans.

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Team: Anja Borowicz Richardson (UK), Bruce Gilchrist (UK), Akshita Gupta (IND), Max Haarich (Artistic Lead / DE), Martina Huynh (NL), Asad Imtiaz (PAK), Muhammad Qasim Khan (PAK), Adrian Ludwig (DE), Pekka Ollikainen (FI), Raphael Pickl (DE)

Project Smart Hans was incubated during the Deepfake Masterclass at Baltan Laboratories  in Eindhoven (NL) under guidance of Ellen Pearlman (US) and Julien Deswaef (NL) from ThoughtWorks Art  as well as Leif Czakai (NL) from Baltan Laboratories. The project won the “Super Artistic AI Award” in the category “Interaction” and the jury’s main prize at Lab30 festival 2022.

Gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.

It was all about money, trying to make money for the next show. We, the Munich embassy of the republic of Užupis, made some research on the problem of money. We found out that all nations are in debt. All nations without exception. So the question is, if everyone is in debt, whom do they owe this money? Who has all the money?

As Užupis was not even listed on the debts chart, maybe we have all the money and just did not notice? So to end this misery, we created emergency money in our local Už-EUR currency. During the offshore exhibition, we paid the debts of the world. Ambassador in colors H.E. Mykolas Kimtis and me provided each visitor emergency money in an amount equal do the visitor’s statistical debt per capita. In total we paid out more than 500K Už-EUR which equals 500K beers in our little republic. As such an liquidity flood would kill our little economy, we urged visitors not to spend the money in Užupis, but to immediately buy Užupis treasury bills instead. Problem solved.

More info: https://www.hausderkunst.de/ausstellungen/zu-gast-offshore-money-for-the-show

Art NFT Linz presents an exhibition and artist talks to explore the story of the past, present, and future of digital art and NFTs. NFTs are neither dead nor without history.

John Gerrard | Jonas Lund | Mitchell F Chan | Operator | Manuel Rossner | Anne Spalter | Mario Klingemann | Lynn Hershman Leeson | TeleNFT | Organic Material | Unsigned | Kevin Abosch | Harm van den Dorpel | UBERMORGEN | Erwin Wurm | CryptoWiener | Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau

Curated by Anika Meier

More info: www.ooekultur.at/event-detail/art-nft-linz