I got the chance to do my first exhibition 2018 in the Museum Strauhof in Zürich. 200 years after a young English writer came up with maybe the story of science and fiction, I decided to retell the story with respect to today's technical realities. That is exactly what I want to do in exhibition spaces: shed light on science and tech - its practices, its paradoxes and pitfalls, its beauty and strangeness. To accomplish this, I like to engage with artists, makers, mavericks of all sorts. Let's embrace complexity!
Frankenstein – From Mary Shelley to the Silicon Valley, Museum Strauhof Zürich
Two hundred years ago they were introduced to the world as fiction: Frankenstein and his creature.
The brilliant scientist Victor Frankenstein creates an artificial being, which he abandons. At first, this creature is neither good nor bad. But being rejected because of its hideous appearance, in the end, it turns against its creator.
With «Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus», 19-year-old Mary Shelley has invented a new genre combining scientific progress with elements of a ghost story. The fascination and fear her tale still evokes have shaped our relation with emerging technologies to this day.
Mary Shelley’s science fiction novel is more relevant than ever: in Silicon Valley and beyond, the development of artificial intelligence systems is progressing at a frantic pace. After all, some of today’s brightest scientists are working on self-learning entities that can think and act autonomously.
The exhibition links key moments of «Frankenstein» with the vision of self-aware AI-beings: quotes and interviews, movie clips and chatbots shed light on the author’s biography and Frankenstein’s myth – and on contemporary research into artificial intelligence.
Ever since the Internet came into existence, the public has become somewhat complicated. Rooms have opened up - but who decides how they are used? Is it the individual users with Speakers' Corners designed from below? Or is it the big players with their business zones from above? In 2018, will the digital be more free space or a monitoring center? The exhibition and series of events attempt to get to the bottom of the various aspects of the public sphere in the digital context.
Biotechnology, artificial intelligence and digitalization provide us with unprecedented opportunities for self-optimization and new inventions. The speed of these developments is unprecedented in the history of mankind. These dynamic technologies meet a society that is largely only fragmentarily informed about modern tools. With a new mediation format, the museum is launching an emotional debate on the subject. Super - The Second Creation: an experiment that combines the strengths of theatre and exhibition. For the first time in Switzerland.