künstliche und künstlerische Intelligenz / artificial and artistic intelligence
24.11.–15.12.2018

Ernst Thoma (*1953, Stein am Rhein), became known in the eighties as a pioneer of electronic music with the band UnknownmiX. Since the mid-nineties, he has been working on a new form of landscape painting. By means of digital image processing, he creates flowing, moving paintings, topographies from natural or urban, sometimes multiple superimposed shots of landscapes. The new work goes one step further in abstraction by analyzing photo and film recordings for specific pictorial elements using digital codes.

Adriana Mikolaskova Nautsch (*1975, Prague) studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich (college of design and art), and later at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (computer science). Early on, in addition to painting, she was also interested in computer-generated images and in particular in programming. The interest in structures of real spaces and the associated pictorial worlds lead her to an examination of the half-timbered structure of the (now expanded) attic in Steckborn, and to an installation of programmed 3D animation and electronic beings.

Hartmut Austen (*1967, Hellersen) studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. He has been living in America for almost two decades now, today with a professorship in Boston. Important components in Austen’s painting are analogue photo clippings as well as digital screenshots, which are sketched several times in small format and thus exposed to a kind of metamorphosis in order to appear again later on large canvases. Through the means of painting, Austen tries to appropriate, slow down and visualize the flood of images through the painting process. Austen’s painting, however, is equally characterized by its lattice and grid structures.