Kathrin Hunze
As a media and visual artist, Kathrin Hunze’s practice moves fluidly between art, design, technology, and both social and natural sciences, working in a research-driven and interdisciplinary context.
Her projects investigate how emerging technologies influence chaotic and complex systems, with a special focus on the ethical impacts these changes have on our perceptions, social interactions, and collective narratives.Central to Hunze’s work is the audiovisual image, functioning as a bridge between mediated realities shaped by historical and sociocultural evolution in humanity, nature, and technology. Her diverse installations, performances, sound and video essays, objects, digital platforms, and prints generate immersive environments—utopian or dystopian in tone—that invite critical engagement and sensory experience.
Are you a happy mesh?
Video series/audiovisual performances/ installation/ object treadmill/print, augmented reality, mixed reality, 2024
Between war and spectacle lies a quiet power. Drones, algorithms, and projected images speak a language of signs that shapes a visual vocabulary and draws us into narratives we barely notice. The aesthetics of light cannot be separated from power: the same spectacle that dazzles can mark borders or instill fear; technology itself is amoral. The real terrain is our thinking—not how they fly, but which stories they anchor in us as they pass overhead.
Machine Royale: Echo Chambers of Our Time
Video installation/object robot surrounded by a guinea pig fent with black shadowballs. 2025
Machine Royale — Echo Chambers of Our Time explores desire within emerging power structures across digital and physical spaces and their effects on society. Technologies like AI and digital currencies fuel a hunger for efficiency, inflating bubbles whose bursts reshape social and economic life. The work asks how we will navigate dataism while dulled by an incessant flood of communication and information.
Self-awareness at 42 % battery level
Installation/object robot with baroque mirror, 2025
The robot’s gaze into the mirror becomes a quiet allegory of a philosophical question: Can a being without consciousness recognize itself?
In “Self-Awareness at 42% Battery Level,” cold mechanics meets the age-old gesture of self-contemplation. The 42% battery level laconically points to limitation: the moment of reflection is fleeting, temporarily charged, half-conscious—a liminal state between thinking and calculating, being and simulation.
Training Your Best Friend: A Character Test
2 Channel, 8:16 min, loop, experimental Video/installation, tank dog robot, cages, accessoires of tanky leo and trainer, print, 2020
The work examines the co-evolutionary relationship between human and machine. How a co-evolution between human and machine behaves, is reflected of the historical background and future significance of a tank. Will the tank of the future have a completely different form?
LEO MN2033 is a with shepherd dog data trained AI that is both a pet and a protector machine. Its task is to serve as a companion and protector in everyday life. Leo has been assigned to the category of working dog, which is subject to the strict and constantly monitored requirements of the German Electronic Shepherd Dog Association.
Data Me
Video/Installation 2023
Data Me explores post-digital life across nature, humans, and machines. The video installation DataMe: DataHorse questions the “happy” virtual body that labours as a data horse for algorithms, trapped in a produce–consume loop. Referencing the dressage method Rollkur (hyperflexion), it likens our constrained online posture—and narrowed perception—to dressage restraint, while platforms reward productivity and conformity with higher feed rankings or “Diamond Fan” badges. How long do we persist?
DATAME: DATAHORSE
Video/Installation, object, moving rocking horse with screen, yoga mat, 2023
Data Me explores post-digital life across nature, humans, and machines. The video installation DataMe: DataHorse questions the “happy” virtual body that labours as a data horse for algorithms, trapped in a produce–consume loop. Referencing the dressage method Rollkur (hyperflexion), it likens our constrained online posture—and narrowed perception—to dressage restraint, while platforms reward productivity and conformity with higher feed rankings or “Diamond Fan” badges. How long do we persist?
Training Your Best Friend: Smart Home Breeding
Video/Installation, objects playpen with robots and smartphone mobile, 2025
Training Your Best Friend: Smart Home Breeding sketches a speculative vignette of a possible everyday life in which machines are not only assistants but emotional points of reference, wards—or perhaps educators themselves. It remains open whether we appear as users, parents, or pets of these systems.
The installation speculatively explores social behaviour and our relationships with new technologies. It starts from the observation that not only our relationships with one another, but also our ideas of affection, upbringing/breeding, and sociality are increasingly being reshaped by algorithmic systems and digital infrastructures.
