Guest of Honor: Sabine Himmelsbach
Summary of Presentation
The presentation will focus on the impact of AI on art production, new aesthetic possibilities, and the cognitive processes and ‘reality-building’ of generative algorithms. Developments will be explored from a curatorial perspective, based on examples of exhibitions at HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, Switzerland.
Biography
Since 2012, Sabine Himmelsbach is director of HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel.
After studying art history in Munich she worked for galleries in Munich and Vienna from 1993–1996 and later became project manager for exhibitions and conferences for the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria. In 1999 she became exhibition director at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. From 2005–2011 she was the artistic director of the Edith-Russ-House for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. 2011 she curated gateways. Art and Networked Culture for the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn as part of the European Capital of Culture Tallinn 2011 program.
Her exhibitionsat HEK in Basel include
Ryoji Ikeda (2014), Poetics and Politics of Data (2015),
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Preabsence (2016),
unREAL (2017),
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Anti-Bodies, Eco-Visionaries (2018),
Entangled Realities. Living with Artificial Intelligence (2019),
Making FASHION Sense (2020),
Real Feelings. Emotion and Technology (2020) and
Earthbound. In Dialogue with Nature (2022).
In 2021, she curated the online exhibition and conference Hybrid by Nature Human.Machine.Interaction for the Goethe Institutes in Southeast Asia. Last year, she was involved in the exhibitions Collaborative Worldbuilding. Art in the Metaverse and Exploring the Decentralized Web. Art on the Blockchain with the topics Web3 and Blockchain.
As a writer and lecturer she is dedicated to topics related to media art and digital culture.