First introduced in 1955, the term “artificial intelligence” (AI) refers today to algorithms and models capable of automatically performing operations—detection, recognition, classification, generation, prediction, and decision-making—that have countless applications. Since the beginning of the 2010s, these technologies have begun to infiltrate every layer of culture and society, economics and politics, science and military operations. Everywhere, they raise multiple ethical, epistemological, and political questions, while consuming massive quantities of natural resources and energy.

Within this general context, artistic practices may play a crucial role. Working with images and sounds, texts and voices, they give sensorial presence to a sphere otherwise dominated by abstract operations, invisible processes, and black boxes. Through critical approaches, artworks question the corporate ownership and extractive logic of the currently dominating AI models, while at the same time showing that other ways of conceiving and shaping AI are possible. The World Through AI presents a selection of works from the last ten years to the present, several of which have been produced specifically for this exhibition. They reflect on what it means to experience the world “through AI”: what it means to perceive, imagine, know, remember, work, and act in a world increasingly infiltrated by AI technologies that reposition the “human” in a vast infrastructure of algorithms.

Filling both exhibition spaces of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Halle 1 and Halle 2), The World Through AI unfolds across thematic spaces that provide a series of coordinates to navigate this rapidly transforming present. Several “time capsules” containing materials from Frankfurt and Mainz archives and museums—some of them tied to the history of the Dondorf printing factory and the Dondorf family—suggest links between the present and the past, thereby situating these current transformations in a historical perspective.