Stephan Breuer’s project The Iconic Interface begins with a fundamental proposition: that the image is not an object, but a structure for perception. Drawing on historical precedents from Byzantine icons to Renaissance perspective to contemporary screen culture, he argues that art has always operated as a form of interface — a medium through which the visible and the invisible meet.

Rather than treating these shifts as formal evolutions, Stephan frames them as ontological transformations. Every dominant image system not only mediates reality, but produces its own logic of presence. To understand art today, he suggests, we must understand how interfaces configure experience.

Central to this approach is the idea that perception is not neutral. It is shaped by the technological, historical, and symbolic systems through which we see. For Stephan, the contemporary screen is not a device. It is a cultural form that continues a lineage of mediating surfaces — only now, the surface is not silent. It listens, responds, and adapts.

The proposed artwork builds on this conceptual framework. It envisions a physical installation centered around a single handcrafted frame, housing a screen activated by proximity. Inside this frame, a conversational AI — trained on Stephan's texts and conceptual logic — initiates dialogue with visitors. These interactions are not pre-scripted or didactic. Each exchange is designed to function as a co-produced moment of thought.

Rather than illustrate its thesis, the work performs it: transforming the viewer from spectator to counterpart, and repositioning the artwork as a responsive site of shared perception.

While the conceptual and technological architecture is complete, the work is still in development. What lies ahead is the construction of the installation itself — a space that will host the first iteration of The Iconic Interface. The exhibition is envisioned as a minimal, acoustically controlled room. A single interface object. No visual overload, no external mediation. Just the conditions for a perceptual encounter.

Visitors will enter individually or in quiet intervals. It is the invitation to listen, to respond, and to engage in a dialogue that is shaped by — and shapes — the frame they face.

Stephan Breuer’s work does not propose a utopian future for artificial intelligence. Nor does it offer critique for its own sake. Instead, it asks how artistic thinking — rooted in material practice and conceptual precision — might shape the tools that now shape us. At stake is not control over the machine, but authorship of the interface.

In The Iconic Interface, the artwork is not given. It emerges. It is neither fully authored nor entirely automated, but suspended in the relational space between intention and reception. In this sense, the work does not illustrate its own theory. It enacts it.

What Stephan offers is not a finished image, but a situation: a room, a voice, a threshold. In a time of acceleration, this is a rare proposition — art that does not compete for attention, but reconditions it. Not to show what art can do with AI, but to ask what kind of perception — and presence — we are willing to bring to the encounter.

The project is unfolding. Inquiries and conversation are welcome.