Human Machine Fellowship

In cooperation with E-WERK Luckenwalde and the VISIT program of the E.ON Foundation, the JUNGE AKADEMIE awards four scholarships annually to international emerging artists from all disciplines on the theme of “Human Machine” The program was founded in 2020 and will be extended for another three years in 2026, expanding to include new formats and partners in Europe. The next call for scholarship applications will be published this summer.

The complex relationship between humanity and machines has been the subject of art and artistic practice since the beginning of the Industrial Age, echoing the beginning of the modern anthropocene, which takes on new meaning in the face of the climate emergency and the emergence and development of digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. Fundamental and ingrained systemic, philosophical, economic, ecological and ethical concepts, as well as images of the world we live in, are being questioned. Following the Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford, AI here is not considered as artificial or intelligent, yet „both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labour, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications.“ As Crawford also describes, it is one of the biggest myths in the field of AI, that intelligence exists independently of social, cultural, historical or political forces, whereas the concept of a superior intelligence has caused immense damage since centuries.

The Human-Machine programme funds international (emerging) artists, who work with, or address ideas surrounding digital technologies, the anthropocene, and/or Artificial Intelligence in the broadest sense; who seek to challenge the Western story of ‘progress’ and problematic dualisms of “natural” and “artificial” and offer new ideas of patterns, narrations and approaches to a world with machines and who explore urgent aspects of today’s societies and the planet and transform their research into aesthetically compelling forms.