PROMISES 

Art Between Perception and Algorithms

Promises - Art Between Perception and Algorithms weaves technological utopias, social contracts, and institutional vows into tangible tension – artworks tracing how coded assurances shape lived reality. This Art Claims Impulse exhibition confronts the gap: algorithms promising connection deliver surveillance, progress pledges liberation births control, perception bends to programmed expectation.

Works navigate promise's double helix – radiant futures flickering against betrayal's shadow, human trust colliding with systemic scripting. A collective inquiry where art decodes the commitments that code us.

Opening, 15.01.2026, 17:00 - 21.00
Exhibition:  16.01.2026 - 13.02.26
Part of Vorspiel 2026
Location: Markgrafenstraße 86, 10969 Berlin

Promises - Art Between Perception and Algorithms brings together artworks that trace how technological, social and institutional promises shape our lives. Through echo chambers, detection systems and participatory setups, art appears here less as a solution and more as an indicator: a way to sense where expectations, control and imagination collide.


Machine Royale — Echo Chambers of Our Time, Kathrin Hunze
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.

                                                     

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How this media artist got discovered by the algorithm
Clemens Schöll & Ortrun Bargholz

Visibility and invisibility are always in tension with each other, both in digital and physical space. Recordings of a video-based performance were examined using the automated object recognition of the YOLO system. The desire for anonymity exists alongside the desire for attention and to be discovered as an artist.

                                                     

Single-channel video (3’5”, 1080×810) with sound, 2021/2024

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A Brighter Flash
Dani Ploeger, Digital Video, 2024

Standing on the street in front of V2_, I give a short lecture on the aesthetics of explosive devices. I am holding a pipe bomb in my hands. The camera slowly moves backwards while I speak. The bomb explodes. While the camera keeps moving away, the film set and the fire SFX mechanism are exposed.

Filmed at V2_Lab for the unstable media, Rotterdam, April 2024
Camera: Jochem Weststrate
Fire effects: Lieven Slabbinck / Divi-Divi
Dolly Grip: Jelle Zuidweg