PhD Candidate Bowie Kim Travels to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy for Dissertation Research
During a recent trip to Düsseldorf and Frankfurt Germany, History of Art PhD candidate Bowie Kim conducted research for her upcoming dissertation on AI-generated art and the visual effects of AI. This research trip enabled her to document more artworks than she had expected and allowed her to develop a specific research plan for AI-generated art in her dissertation.
She focused on the art institutions K21 in Düsseldorf and Schirn in Frankfurt, where she attended the opening reception of Starmirror and met composer and artist Holly Herndon in person. During this time, K21 was also presenting Jon Rafman’s solo exhibition, Main Stream Media. For her dissertation research on web-based art and the relationship between art and the internet, Kim was able to document the exhibition in detail, noting Rafman’s expression of the confusion between web space and reality conveyed the concern that internet reality causes hallucinations in physical reality.
At Schirn in Frankfurt, Kim visited the exhibition The World through AI, which strongly focused on AI-generated systems and their relationships with contemporary society and artworks. The World through AI provided a diverse understanding of AI from various artistic perspectives, including embodiment, sound, medicine, biology, information, communication, etc.
For an additional personal trip following her funded research trip, Kim visited Lugano, Switzerland, to see the exhibition K-NOW! Korean Video Art Today. She then traveled to Venice for the 61st International Biennale in Venice, CANICULA at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, and the exhibition Strange Rules at Palazzo Diedo. Many well-known artists participated in this exhibition, and Kim noted in particular the poignant curating by Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Hans Ulrich Obrist which suggested an entangled but coexisting relationship between humans and technology.
Bowie Kim’s trip and research opportunity was made possible through funding from the Cathleen M. Murnane Travel Scholarship and the Arts and Humanities Graduate Research Small Grant.