Why Make Images at All Today? Mario Klingemann in conversation with Anika Meier about boredom and inert images

In a moment when images are produced, circulated, and consumed at unprecedented speed, the question of why to make images at all becomes increasingly urgent. Mario Klingemann reflects on a growing sense of exhaustion with image-making and the difficulty of finding meaning within a visual culture shaped by artificial intelligence and constant optimization for attention.
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On the occasion of his solo show Conflict of Interest at SLEEK Art Space during Gallery Weekend Berlin, he speaks with curator Anika Meier about boredom, inert images, and the challenge of sustaining attention. Rather than seeking novelty, Klingemann turns toward what initially repels him, describing a practice of withdrawal, persistence, and working through images that resist immediate meaning.

Anika Meier. Mario, what is the conflict of interest you find yourself in as an artist?

Mario Klingemann. What makes something interesting, especially images? That’s a question that has accompanied me as an artist from the very beginning. It’s also how I arrived at artificial intelligence, through generative art. Today we live in a world where it’s very easy to create interesting images, or anything interesting at all..

For the past three years, I’ve had a problem. I no longer see the point of making images. For me, the subject is essentially exhausted. But that’s exactly what I’m supposed to do as an artist: make images. So I’m trying to find something that makes image-making interesting for me again. That could involve AI, but not generative. I want to go where it hurts.

I try to move into areas that repel me, because they initially feel boring. My hope is that precisely there I might find something that brings back the joy of making images, or of looking at them.

Anika Meier. That reminds me of a talk by Hito Steyerl that I watched online a few days ago. Under the title Art in the Age of Authoritarian Chatbots, she speaks, among other things, about inoperative images, drawing on the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. By this she means images that no longer have to perform.

Mario Klingemann. I call images that are not meant to perform inert images. Of course, there’s nothing original about that. This has been discussed in photography for decades. But what can you do?

That’s the second problem: you simply know too much. Even with AI, you can no longer approach something innocently, with that kind of childlike ignorance where you just make something because it’s fun. Instead, you’re constantly reminded that you’re moving through territories that have already been explored a hundred times.

I still want to go there, but I’m constantly confronted with the fact that others have already been there too. That has always been my problem: trying to find my own isolated islands, places where I can be alone, at least for a while. But that’s becoming increasingly difficult with AI, because it effectively “strip-mines” the space of possibilities, finding every gap.

That’s the conflict. I have to work against myself and against everything that already exists. At the same time, AI was interesting to me for a long time because it also functioned like a kind of protective shield.

Anika Meier. And how do you work now as an artist to arrive at images?

Mario Klingemann. With the help of AI and my tendency to collect discarded images, I deliberately work my way through inert images. In fact, nothing is truly boring. But our brain tells us that certain things are boring because we don’t understand them, because we don’t recognize patterns, or because we’re too lazy to engage with them. Through this kind of sustained attention, patterns suddenly begin to emerge that become interesting again.

It’s almost like a self-experiment in which something shifts. It’s difficult to describe.

Anika Meier. Are you shifting pattern recognition back from the machine to yourself, the human?

Mario Klingemann. What I’m interested in is recognizing patterns again and resisting my own perception when it tells me: there’s nothing there, it all looks the same. In everyday life, you’re constantly distracted, by social media and increasingly also by AI images designed for maximum attention. Attention is desperately looking for something it can latch onto.

By filtering that out and deliberately focusing on a limited area, my brain is forced, without distraction, to find something there that it considers interesting.

Anika Meier. I’ve been by the sea for a few days, looking a lot at the water and into the distance. It’s true, my eyes keep searching for something to hold on to, usually ships or birds.

Mario Klingemann. In a way, that’s nothing new, but I think it’s something like a detox from over-optimized, attention-driven, AI-generated material. Of course, AI could do that too.

Anika Meier. But you’re doing this without AI now?.

Mario Klingemann. At the moment, I’m not using AI for it. It’s a conscious decision not to. This so-called AI aesthetic is everywhere now. You’re almost surrounded by it, because it’s simply what works, especially in the channels we use. I deliberately hold it back and don’t share it, because I want to keep it to myself. It’s a form of withdrawal.

That’s also why I don’t upload these images to the cloud or anywhere online, because I want to prevent any AI from training on them. It’s an attempt to preserve something. Maybe that’s nostalgic or naive, but the hope is that as long as it stays with me, it won’t leak out and immediately wear out again. This kind of exhaustion happens much faster with AI, because everything is constantly tracked and repeated. My feeling is that these processes are accelerating. Everything becomes more worthless because it is so available and omnipresent.

I’m still searching for the perfect solution. It’s a Sisyphean task, because our brains are wired to get bored as soon as they recognize the patterns.

Anika Meier. You’re searching for ways to arrive at inert images. For the exhibition Conflict of Interest, you made an attempt with Weapons of Mass Distraction. When I look at the tangle of tubes and screws, I feel like I’m at sea. My eyes search for something to hold on to.

Mario Klingemann. Stimuli are essentially what attract attention. It’s like being in an isolation chamber: if you hear no sound and look at an empty white wall, your brain adjusts to a different spectrum. You suddenly hear your own heartbeat or see hallucinations, because it starts to normalize on its own and generates patterns.

The same thing happens with AI models. That’s why it’s almost impossible to remove all stimuli, because the system immediately readjusts itself.

This is also what happens in my new series Weapons of Mass Distraction: by suppressing or removing obvious activations, the model keeps “repairing” itself and tries to generate meaning again from what little remains. There’s no escaping that.

Anika Meier. As you know, the title Weapons of Mass Distraction confused me a bit. And just now I even misspoke again and said “destruction” instead of “distraction.” The critique of AI is sharp at the moment. There’s a lot of discussion around techno-fascism, tech bros, and the concentration of power in large platforms that deliberately shape our perception. Beeple’s exhibition Regular Animals is running during Gallery Weekend at the Neue Nationalgalerie, parallel to your exhibition Conflict of Interest at SLEEK Art Space. With his robot dogs bearing the heads of Musk and Zuckerberg, Beeple points to how algorithms determine what we see and how we perceive the world. Where do you position your work in this context?

Marion Klingemann. With Weapons of Mass Distraction, I’m referring to Claude Shannon’s information theory and to how our brain processes stimuli. For me, this is first and foremost a fundamental mode of perception.

That’s why I’m not interested in attributing everything to techno-fascism or capitalism. These systems certainly exploit such mechanisms, but they are not their origin. The logic of attention runs deeper, in the way we process information. There’s no escaping that. You can only try to develop strategies for dealing with it.

And I’m not alone in this. A lot of people are currently at a loss about what comes next. Not that I have a solution. But at least we can cry together.

Anika Meier. How did the series Weapons of Mass Distraction come about? Did you work with your own training data and your own model?

Mario Klingemann. You can modify the tools if you have the necessary skills. In my work, I do that because otherwise a kind of visual monoculture emerges. Many people think that AI simply looks a certain way, but that’s because the tools are built to satisfy as many people as possible.

I try to break this cliché of what AI art is supposed to look like.

Anika Meier. In discussions around AI, I’m often struck by how it sounds as if AI just makes art on its own, without a human prompting anything beforehand.

Marion Klingemann. That leads to these average images that don’t hurt anyone and cater to a certain aesthetic. That’s how you reach the most people. From a marketing perspective, it makes sense: why make disturbing images when you can reach far more people with pleasing ones? With disturbing images, you reach fewer people, and with boring ones as well. What matters is this middle zone that appeals. But that’s exactly what kitsch is.

Kitsch has been used by very different political systems for a reason, because it works on a mass level and corresponds to certain aesthetic expectations. For me, though, it’s framed differently: the images are not inherently bad. They function, they have an effect, and that’s why they are used deliberately.

Mario Klingemann, Trigger, frame_4594_bloom_4x.

Anika Meier. You’ve been working with music and systems for years. What drew you to music as a material that you didn’t find in images?

Mario Klingemann. I’m not sure I would simply describe music as a “material.” That makes it sound as if I put music in at the front and art comes out at the back.

For me, music is a medium and a form of information, in the same way that texts and images are forms of information that we perceive and process with our brains. Each medium operates on different levels, and for me music is the most “physical” of them all, the one that has the most immediate connection to our entire body. At the same time, different kinds of information are never strictly separate, but overlap in their emotional effects, associations, and interpretations. It’s precisely these zones of overlap that I find fascinating. And also the “translation” from one medium into another, and the question of what can be carried across and what cannot.

Anika Meier. In your music videos, it’s not about visualization but about coupling, as in Das Atom spaltet die Jugend. The image follows the music, but not in an illustrative way.

Marion Klingemann. I think most people would see me as a fairly rational person who mainly uses the left side of his brain. And that’s not entirely wrong, but when it comes to music, especially danceable music, I can’t help but move to it. If I look at that analytically, those movements are a projection of the complex patterns I perceive in a song onto the range of possibilities that my skeleton and muscles allow. The body is also a kind of multidimensional system, and gestures and sequences of movement are their own language.

Generative models, especially GANs like the ones I used in 2020 for Das Atom, are systems that transform a multidimensional input, simply put a series of a few hundred numbers, into an image. And just as you can’t bend a body arbitrarily, GANs also follow certain rules, in this case mathematical rather than physical ones. Just as I can move my hand from one point in space to another, I can guide GANs from one position in latent space to another and get a continuous movement and a tangible sense of dynamics, which, however, do not have to obey the laws of the physical world. For me, that is exactly the element of surprise that I am always hoping to find in my practice.

Mario Klingemann, Das Atom., frame_004775_bloom_6x.

Anika Meier. How did you technically connect the music to the model?

Mario Klingemann. The model for Das Atom was StyleGAN2, developed by NVIDIA, trained on faces, and freely available. Since in 2020 there was no model that allowed for generating, deforming, or moving full human bodies at the same quality as faces, I tried to translate music into head movements, facial expressions, or different identities and was simply curious to discover what would be possible.

For the video, I programmed a system that first analyzes the music and extracts information: the energy in different frequency ranges, rhythm, and melody are translated into numbers, which I then made accessible and isolated across multiple channels, allowing me to connect them to different “inputs” in my GAN. These inputs also had to be created first.

In the case of StyleGAN faces, you could compare the whole setup to a marionette with hundreds of strings attached. If I pull one, the eyes move to the left, the mouth opens, and the hair grows. Another string makes the person ten years older and turns the head slightly upward to the left. The first problem to solve was figuring out which strings to pull and by how much, or which to loosen, so that in the end only the head moves or only the mouth opens. Once I had identified several dozen of these latent directional vectors, the next step was to connect the musical information to these “strings” and let my facial marionette dance and age.

Anika Meier. While your image-based works often revolve around stillness, reduction of stimuli, and withdrawal, music imposes a temporal structure. How do you deal with this contradiction in your new music video, which is generated endlessly?

Marion Klingemann. To truly appreciate boredom, you also have to know and experience its opposite. At the same time, nothing is more boring than something that is endless, or at least suggests that it is. In the case of On and On (2026), only the visual part is endless; the song repeats after half an hour, which for most listeners probably feels like an eternity.

To be honest, I don’t think anyone but me has the patience to listen to it all the way through, because after a short time you begin to feel that nothing more is coming that would be worth your time.

That’s the point I’m trying to show in the exhibition: some patterns only reveal themselves if you force yourself to resist the whisperings of boredom telling you that there is nothing interesting to see or hear, and to keep going, even if it hurts at first.

Anika Meier. In relation to images, you’ve spoken about “inert images.” Does this idea also work with music, or does music contradict it?

Mario Klingemann. I think John Cage can say more about that than I can. When I talk about inert images, the connection to 4′33″ is already quite obvious. Both are based on the phenomenon that once you remove everything that normally attracts our attention, our brain adjusts to a different “volume level” and begins to perceive, or even hallucinate, signals and patterns that would otherwise be lost in the noise.

Anika Meier. Thank you for the conversation!

About the artist

Mario Klingeamnn is an artist exploring creativity through AI and algorithms. He investigates how machines can emulate or expand human perception. Creator of the autonomous AI artist Botto, hehas exhibited globally and received awards including the Lumen Prize Gold and a Prix Ars Electronica mention. His work spans neural networks, storytelling, and cybernetic aesthetics.

Website

About the author

Anika Meier is a writer and curator specializing in digital art. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and teaches at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (Class of UBERMORGEN, Department of Digital Art). She is the co-founder of The Second-Guess, a curatorial collective based in Berlin and Los Angeles that explores the relationship between humans and technology.

Anika on Substack

About the exhibition

Conflict of Interest opens on Monday, April 27 (6–10 pm), at SLEEK Art Space (Alexanderstraße 7, 10178 Berlin) on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin. The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm and Sunday from 11 am to 3 pm.

Mario Klingeamnn: Conflict of Interest

On Saturday, May 2 (10 am–1 pm), a champagne breakfast with an artist talk (11–11:30 am) will take place under the title Conflict of Interest: Inert Images vs. Attention Maxxing in the Age of AI Slop. Mario Klingemann in conversation with Anika Meier.

SLEEK in partnership with Art on Tezos.

More about the exhibition here