Artists

Stefan Müller

Press release

If the web could dream, it would probably dream the kind of paintings Müller paints here.

We are pleased to invite you to Stefan Müller's new exhibition my algorithms did this to me. The twisted grid as a “computer image”, and then, right in the middle, the pixelated rabbit. In his new exhibition my algorithms did this to me, Stefan Müller refers to the aesthetic memory of the early digital era of the 80s and 90s. Why is he doing this today? Perhaps, as Walter Benjamin wrote in Passagen-Werk, because the new means of production first translate themselves into the aesthetics of the old… Machines learn, but perhaps also because the early computer aesthetics (the net) seem so physical from today's perspective that one could become sentimental. If the web could dream, it would probably dream the kind of paintings Müller paints here.

The title of the exhibition refers to a poem by Jack Spicer “My vocabulary did this to me”, pointing to the ambivalence of doing and undoing in art and the flow of creative energy. If today the so-called AI and the capabilities of self-learning algorithms in the service of and against humans dominate the daily press, Spicer's poem is about the human medium as an inseparable unity of mind and body: the hypersensitive artist as a permeable tool. The greatest cultural challenge in relation to AI is that it can remember everything, but it cannot forget.

Forgetting contours. It is an important survival tool and takes place during sleep/dreaming. Forgetting is the filter that protects us from the onslaught of daily impressions and facts. Endless remembering is an overload for the human psyche, a sensory overload and possibly leads to a breakdown of the memory or even to its extinction the moment we remember more than we can.