“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

“Teletext is Art” is a multimodal exhibition experience dedicated to 7 bit teletext art. The artworks are presented on air in ORF TELETEXT and ARD text, online at the Museum of Teletext Art, on chain as NFTs on the Tezos blockchain, and in real life at the Ars Electronica Festival 2022.

Watch the Austrian National News’ report about our exhibition.

The digital artworks will been contributed by the 15 international artists presented by TeleNFT, which, for the first time brought cryptoart into the teletext and teletext art onto the blockchain. The contributed works stand out for their deliberate use of medium and context. Teletext raises expectations: on the one hand, it raises aesthetic expectations of technically possible colors and resolutions. Some works play with this ironically by producing even lower levels of detail, sometimes at great expense. On the other hand, the teletext medium raises service expectations of information, news and entertainment. But instead of neutral information, a clear position is taken here; against nation-state wars, against the abortion policy of the USA, against the lies of the classical financial system. Instead of repeating the daily news, it specifically highlights the blind spots, such as mechanisms of monetary policy, which are usually hardly discussed on TV. And instead of illustrating sex hotlines, one prefers to offer entertainment in the form of eerie short stories.

Max Haarich & Gleb Divov

In cooperation with ORF, ARD, and Museum of Teletext Art

More info here: https://ars.electronica.art/planetb/de/teletext-is-art/

Online teletext viewer: https://teletext.orf.at/channel/orf1/page/560/1

During 1E9’s Festival der Zukunft at Deutsches Museum we exhibited our new 7bit movements NFT collection.“7bit movements” is an artistic investigation into the boundaries of visual perception. 13 international artists created short 7bit GIF animations to challenge our perception of movement.

At the festival we organized a workshop on how to create teletext art based on the Tius software by code artist and teletext OG Matthias Waldorf and boradcasted the results live on SAT.1 teletext.

More infos on 7bit movements: www.uzupis.de/7bit

“Dawn of the Metaverse” is Germany’s first gallery exclusively presenting NFT-based art. It will be opened on 7 May in the heart of Munich, in the Donisl-Passage at Marienplatz 1.

Curators Max Haarich (DE) and Gleb Divov (LT) will show works by local and international digital artists from May 7 – June 26, 2022. The selected and regularly changing works demonstrate the medial range of NFT-based art. In terms of content, the artists deal, among other things, with the utopia and dystopia of completely virtualized living worlds, so-called metaverses.

Further info here.

Art&Science Panel on AI and NFT @ Deutsches Museum

How are digital works of art actually created? Can artificial intelligence be creative? And how can art help bring people into contact with science and technology and fuel social debates? The panel at the Hi!A Festival with Wolfgang M. Heckl, Director General of the Deutsches Museum, digital artist Betty Mü and Užupis Ambassador Max Haarich was streamed live on December 2.

Here you can watch the discussion again.

SAAI Award for AI project Smart Hans

The team Smart Hans lead by H.E. Max Haarich won Super Artistic AI Factory‘s award in the category “interaction” for their mind-reading horse installation. The award comes with a 2,000 USD production budget to make the installation exhibition ready.

Here is the full story behind the project.

15K € Funding for Artistic Research on Ethical AI

The German Berufsverband Bildender KünstlerInnen awarded Munich ambassador H.E. Max Haarich a grant of 15.000 EUR for an artistic research project in the area of ethical Artificial Intelligence. The grant is financed by the program Neustart Kultur and includes budget for an art installation, which will be exhibited in 2022.