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In 2024, Kultur | lx continues its series of ‘cartes blanches’. After a year in which illustration dominated our homepage with works by Dirk Kesseler, Irina Moons and Keong-A Song, followed by a year dedicated to video with works by Suzan Noesen and Justine Blau, Kultur | lx is initiating a cycle around the digital arts, starting with the work Artificial God by the Luxembourg-based XR artist and director Laura Mannelli.

“Artifical God is a digital work created using Al. Inspired by the Rorschach test, the AI transposes a series of illustrations into a video sequence. The work contrasts a cult film from the 1920s, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and in particular his humanoid robot Futura, with an equally cult text from the 1980s, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. While Fritz Lang’s film featured a robot for the first time in cinema, it was the image of the evil female witch that was chosen to embody a robot capable of causing chaos among humans. Based on the closing postulate of the Cyborg manifesto, I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess, I wanted to free Maria from her condition as a woman caught between the figure of a saintly woman venerated in her human version and that of an evil woman and witch in her robot counterpart. So while Fritz Lang’s film suggests that machines are capable of controlling, manipulating and enslaving men, Maria, through Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure, is on the contrary capable of freeing herself from her control systems in order to emancipate herself from rigid categories, whether in terms of gender, nature or social status. The video shows Maria’s hypnotic transmutation into a super-powerful ‘Mecha’. ‘Mechas’ are huge robotic containers packed with technology that enable their human hosts to acquire superhuman abilities. It’s a way of denouncing man’s relentless quest to transcend his human condition and become a kind of artificial god.“, explains the artist.

Discover her work on the home page of our website.