Human Machine Fellowship

The JUNGE AKADEMIE in partnership with VISIT (the artist-in-residence programme of the E.ON Stiftung) and E-WERK Luckenwalde is offering four fully funded fellowships each year in 2024 and 2025 for international artists to fund projects operating at the intersection of art, science and ecology, concerning the topic of the human-machine. Successful fellows will be endowed with EUR 20,000. Three of the artists will have the opportunity to take advantage of the production and studio spaces at E-WERK Luckenwalde for three months, and one fellowship will take place at Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

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.

Applications are currently open. Further information here.

The jury includes:

Anna Gritz, Director, Haus am Waldsee
Anh-Linh Ngo, Vice president of Akademie der Künste, Architecture Theorist and Curator
Tiara Roxanne, Artist
Sinthujan Varatarajah, Political Geographer
Laura Helena Wurth, Art critic and Curator