Mario Klingemann's 'Conflict of Interest' at Sleek Art Space

During Berlin Gallery Weekend, Mario Klingemann presents 'Conflict of Interest,' a pop-up exhibition curated by Anika Meier at Sleek Art Space, in collaboration with Art on Tezos. The show explores the tension between human control and machine logic in AI-generated art. Klingemann, known for creating the AI artist Botto—which generates weekly works voted on by a community, sold as NFTs at Sotheby's for millions, and recently appeared at Art Basel Hong Kong—questions how to produce compelling images in an era of visual overload. The exhibition features 'Landscapes,' a series of mundane slide photographs collected by the artist, presented as simple prints to challenge viewers' attention. More unsettling is 'Weapons of Mass Distraction,' where Klingemann intervenes in an AI's transformer layer, disrupting its image generation to create hybrid results from the struggle between artist and machine. A 2020 video, 'Triggernometry,' shows AI-generated faces morphing to music, aging and decaying, highlighting the uncanny capabilities of earlier AI.