Zurich Art Weekend: How is the art world responding to the technological revolution?

Stopping at Art Weekend Zurich on the way to Art Basel has become an essential rite of passage in the art world. In as many as 73 venues, Zurich will host more than 100 free events, all arranged over a single weekend. This year, the combination of art and technology received special attention.

Even in Switzerland, where the city of Zug, known as the "Crypto Valley" is located, NFT mania is fading. Interest in NFTs has faded since last year, but at this year's sixth Zurich Art Weekend (June 9-11), AI was undoubtedly the acronym everyone was talking about.

If there's one city that can lead the conversation, it's Zurich. As the financial center of Switzerland, it offers attractive tax breaks for residents, making it a natural enclave for high-net-worth collectors; it has world-class research laboratories and is home to major technology companies such as Google, Apple and IBM .

Still, it will be difficult for Zurich to successfully bridge the art and tech worlds, which have very different customs and cultures. Since its inception in 2018, this mission has been at the heart of the interdisciplinary program Zurich Art Weekend.

"We wanted to open up a dialogue between artists and scientists," Charlotte von Stotzingen, the event's founding director, told Artnet News. “Two years ago we thought the two worlds could be brought closer, but now we see that the divide remains. From a structural point of view, the art world hasn’t changed much. The old patterns are back.”

Zurich Art Weekend crafts impressively large-scale exhibitions as well as solid panels that draw on Zurich's wide-ranging expertise. "We try to turn the whole of Zurich into a platform for exchange, not only between speakers on stage, but also to generate new ideas and debates among the masses," says von Stotzingen.

wonderful exhibition

Data Alchemy: Observing Galileo to Artificial Intelligence (Data Alchemy: Observing Patterns From Galileo to Artificial Intelligence)

• ETH Zürich

• June 9–24, 2023

“ETH is like the MIT of Europe,” von Stotzingen said. The research university's AI center has hired a small group of curators to help organize public programming around the creative potential of the new technology.

Artificial intelligence is powerful because it can perform fast-paced and efficient pattern recognition, but historically, we've been happy to rely on the human brain to observe our surroundings and make our own inferences and predictions. The exhibition compares the history of cosmology, religion, mysticism, and other esoteric belief systems with the mysteries of today's "black box" machine learning algorithms. Are we circling back to a less rational, pre-Enlightenment way of understanding the world? More details here .

reconFIGURE

• Immersive Arts Space, ZHdK

• June 9–11

The immersive art space at Zurich's leading art university ZHdK is led by Christopher Salter, an artist and specialist in digital immersive and mixed reality experiences. "We are so lucky that he is in Zurich all year round," von Stotzingen said.

This project explores how the human body and experiences can be captured, represented and reconfigured with the help of emerging technologies. As visitors enter the exhibition, their bodies are scanned so that a moving silhouette or lifelike avatar appears in the room and moves independently, or even merges with others.

For Real by Christopher Kulendran Thomas

• Kunsthalle Zurich at 270 Limmatstrasse, 8005, Zurich

• Open June 9, 6pm

Arriving in Zurich after a successful solo exhibition at London's ICA, Christopher Kulendran Thomas has attracted attention for his extensive practice incorporating artificial intelligence generation tools. For example, in the film The Finesse, which explores the independence movement and acts of artistic resistance in the Tamil community, archival footage is mixed with AI-generated avatars. The exhibition also includes new paintings, whose compositions were created by algorithms trained on a variety of Western and non-Western art historical paintings and themes. More details here .

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