Ubermorgen - Ai and nostalgia

In the 1990s, the internet arrived accompanied by promises that it would solve everything. Three decades later, AI is surrounded by predictions at the opposite extreme: that it might destroy everything. Having worked critically with networked technologies since the early days of the web, UBERMORGEN are wary of both narratives.

Founded by lizvlx and Hans Bernhard in 1995, UBERMORGEN emerged with the early web and have spent their practice testing the technologies, platforms, and power structures that increasingly organize everyday life. Google, Amazon, eBay, surveillance, commerce, and digital identity have all become material for their work. Their method has rarely been to observe technology from a safe distance. As lizvlx says: “Criticism doesn’t mean you don’t use something. If I don’t use it, I don’t know it.”

That makes Web Nostalgia, the theme of Kento’s first season, an interesting proposition for UBERMORGEN. Kento builds on objkt’s roots in the Tezos ecosystem, bringing digital art into the physical world through collectible trading cards. Their two cards draw directly on their own history: UBERMORGEN’s long-running use of seals, the colors of their website from 2000, and the visual languages of authority, identity, and value. Yet lizvlx has little interest in romanticizing the internet of the 1990s. It may have felt “like a small party,” but UBERMORGEN never subscribed to the idea of the web as a utopia.

AI presents another technological system to investigate from the inside. UBERMORGEN are already working with it, but lizvlx isn’t interested in rushing toward a definitive position. She is still playing, testing, watching—and, in her words, trying to figure out: “Where is my biggest beef?”

In conversation with writer and curator Anika Meier for The AI Art Magazine, lizvlx considers the early web and AI without treating either as utopia or catastrophe—and returns to an approach that has shaped UBERMORGEN’s practice from the beginning: use the technology, examine its power, test its limits, and find out where the confusion actually lies.

Anika Meier. If we speak about the early days of the web, what are you nostalgic about?

Liz. Isn’t nostalgia something where, once you engage in it, you automatically paint things in a light that wasn’t necessarily the light of the day back then?

I have this weird feeling that I might not be a very nostalgic character. There are moments when nostalgia hits you, but to me it’s usually not a very giving feeling, to put it in modern terms. It’s very close to melancholy and sadness. And I do like sadness a lot. I really enjoy it, as any woman with a monthly cycle.

Of course, there is the early web nostalgia of the 1990s, when the web was very small and you could basically talk to anyone because it was such a small circle. You would just find each other. It was like a small party. That was great, but it’s not something I’m nostalgic about because it was only good for a certain period of time. I wouldn’t want it back. Been there, done that. It was great, thank you, and moved on.

Anika Meier. When people are nostalgic about the early web, they often describe it as a more utopian moment, before platforms, surveillance, and the concentration of power we have today. Did you ever share that sense of optimism?

Liz. UBERMORGEN never came from the idea of the web as a utopia. We always saw it, not necessarily as a dystopia, but clearly as something that could become a huge manipulator.

I remember in the 1990s we were sometimes genuinely angry at people who said, “The internet is going to solve everything.” People are still people. People can fuck everything up. Back then you needed maybe one asshole in a hundred to fuck things up. Now, thanks to technology, you need one asshole in a million, and you can produce a trillionaire. Great. That’s progress. (laughs) So I can’t really be nostalgic for that.

Anika Meier. Politics has always been closely connected to your artistic practice. Looking back over almost 30 years of your practice, what has changed in your relationship with technology?

Liz. We love playing with technology. I was never interested in hardware. I was a child who didn’t play with Lego because I couldn’t stand all those little pieces. It was too constructive. You have to put this there and that there. It didn’t feel free. Software is more malleable.

We’re building a new website for something at the moment, and I’m doing it with somebody else. I was trying to explain to this person how you build a website from our perspective, and I told him he had to watch the R.A.F. movie (The Baader Meinhof Komplex, 2008) to understand it. It sounds absurd, but it isn’t.

Websites are infrastructure. Technology is infrastructure. Infrastructure is always contested. It has to be protected. It can be attacked. I’m not saying this from some paranoid web-admin mindset. That’s simply how you have to understand infrastructure. The power of technology was always something we worked with. It’s just much more visible now. In the early days of the web, you could fuck with people through the browser. Open some shit, fuck things up, close the browser. You can’t do that anymore. People react as if you fucked with their children. They get offended over pixels.

And that’s maybe something I am nostalgic about. Everything you do as a digital artist is ultimately just pixels on a screen. The great thing about this work is that it isn’t that relevant. And that irrelevance gives you freedom.

I’m glad art isn’t more relevant. If it were, it would be much less free, because then it becomes politics. And in politics you can’t have ultimate freedom. You need rules. You need accountability.

Anika Meier. Do you feel that artists still have that freedom today?

Liz. Maybe I’m nostalgic for people using that freedom in art simply to make things. Today, in almost every exhibition we do, there is some problem: “You can’t do this, that’s offensive. Why would you do that? Maybe we have to change this.”

We joke that we prefer the Chinese version, where you send the work to the censors first and it comes back. Except, of course, you don’t actually send it directly to the censors. You send it to people who decide what might be acceptable to the censors. And before you even send it to them, you’re already thinking about what might be acceptable. It’s layer after layer of self-censorship. The joke is that the people who see the best art are the Chinese censors because they get everything fresh. What a great audience. Maybe we should produce only for the censors of the world.

In a strange way, the censors have more freedom than the people being censored.

Anika Meier. To make anything visible, you often depend on social media, and those platforms determine what gets amplified. Has the space for experimentation simply moved?

Liz. The channels for attention have become streamlined. But from a net art perspective, that’s also just another system that can be hacked. How we work and what our work looks like has changed because it depends on the technology available. But we are still net artists in the sense that it’s about examining technology, using it off-label, finding the little holes where you can make things happen that aren’t supposed to happen.

One thing we really learned during the pandemic is that art and culture are things people cannot live without. The theaters closed. You couldn’t go to concerts. People were like, “No, I’m dead.” And yes, you’re right, you’re dead. There’s a reason there are prehistoric paintings in caves. Artistic expression might be one of the few things that is genuinely human in a way that distinguishes us from other animals. Although I’m looking forward to orca art, I have to say.

And to come back to nostalgia: you can create these feelings again. Coherence, togetherness, this feeling that we are all here together. You just have to find the right niches, these little doors of attention that people can enter. Maybe that’s why we aren’t particularly nostalgic. For us, these moments keep happening.

Anika Meier.For Kento, objkt’s physical-digital collectible card project, you contributed two cards to the first season, which is dedicated to Web Nostalgia. Both works take the form of UBERMORGEN seals. Why seals?

Liz. If it’s about nostalgia, there have to be seals. UBERMORGEN has used seals for a very long time instead of a logo. A seal represents the authority of some obscure entity, often a state entity. Imagine the President of the United States standing at a podium without the seal. Suddenly he’s just some guy standing there.

Anika Meier. And what are the two seals you made for Kento?

Liz. One of them is our current UBERMORGEN self-portrait. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time because I really like graphics, in the sense of graphs. It represents us as different columns in a graph. I think it’s my absolute favorite self-portrait. It’s a neoliberal self-portrait: just data visualization. I used the colors from our website in 2000. Nostalgia. The other is a fake Greco-Roman coin showing two women kissing. It’s called Menstalgia. Of course, it’s a double entendre. It’s this funny idea of how much men love watching women have sex with each other, while at the same time, in the context of nostalgia, they might be longing for a time when they still imagined they could somehow be part of it.

Anika Meier. Speaking of AI and nostalgia: generative models produce images from enormous archives of existing imagery. In a sense, they are machines for producing nostalgia. How do you approach that as an artist?

Liz. We work with AI a lot. One thing that always annoys me is when you work with Midjourney and it asks you to personalize your style. I’m like: No. That’s the last thing I want to do. I don’t want to create a personal style. That would be horrible.

Anika Meier. Why?

Liz. Because AI is constantly rehashing old imagery and creating semi-new things from it. And in a way, I think that’s great. UBERMORGEN is so copyleft that our attitude has always been: Fuck it, reuse everything. But copyleft comes with the condition that you don’t exploit the things or the people whose work you use. I’m not saying it’s cool for huge companies to take photographs we made and make money from them. That’s bullshit.

But I also look at all the terrible NFTs people make, all the really bad art and really bad AI art, and think: people are expressing themselves creatively. Of course, much of what they produce is bad because most people aren’t great artists. But if you go to a pottery class because you enjoy making a bowl, most people there are going to make a terrible bowl. They still love their bowl. That’s what it’s for. It doesn’t have to be critically acclaimed.

I love all the slop. I could do with fewer naked, big-boobed women, obviously, but that’s reality. I’m a fan. I’m not somebody who says, “Oh no, this is destroying good art. People are only making superficial images.”

One thing I particularly love is that AI can make really great advertising. I find it absurd when people get angry that big companies use AI images in advertisements. Did you really think they cared about great photographers? What did you think advertising was?

Anika Meier. But people aren’t only angry because companies use AI. There are several things happening at once: the energy consumption, the political power of the companies, fears about what AI could eventually do, and then, especially for creatives, the fact that their own work has been used to build these systems. You mentioned copyleft.

Liz. I think there has long been a misunderstanding among some people working in the commercial creative world. A lot of people thought they were somehow irreplaceable. But if you work in a commercial environment, you are always interchangeable. That is part of the basic idea of a commercial environment.

And that must really hurt. I’m not making fun of these people. Imagine you’re a great illustrator and suddenly your work is no longer needed. That’s painful. But the same thing happened to the dinosaurs. Of course we lose something. Every time something disappears, we lose something. An individual illustrator will create images that AI would never arrive at because they can be genuinely original. AI doesn’t work that way.

That is sad. But it doesn’t make me nostalgic. That’s simply not my mindset.

Google Will Eat Itself / GWEI (Bombshelter, Holon) UBERMORGEN, 2005 Installation view, Digital Art Museum http://www.gwei.org Courtesy UBERMORGEN & Private Collection

Anika Meier. You’ve made projects around Google, eBay and Amazon. You were critical of these companies and the systems they created. Now you use tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT yourself. Has your approach changed?

Liz. But we used Amazon too. Criticism doesn’t mean you don’t use something. That’s not the point. If I don’t use it, I don’t know it.

Anika Meier. But you haven’t made a critical work about AI yet.

Liz. No. But it’s not as if Google appeared and two years later we made projects making fun of Google. It takes time. It takes the right moment. It isn’t about attacking something. It’s about finding where the confusion actually lies. The trilogy with Amazon, Google and eBay was largely about pixel money: these enormous companies that are so valuable, while the value is manifested in real jobs. Amazon obviously creates real jobs, but many of them aren’t professions. And people need professions to build a life. Another stupid robotic job where you just move shit around doesn’t give somebody a sustainable life. So those works were about much more than simply criticizing a company.

With AI, I’m still playing with it and trying to figure out: Where is my biggest beef? That isn’t necessarily a public process.

For the show we did in Romania, for example, we made a pattern with ChatGPT. I wanted a wall tapestry, a fabric pattern combining neo-fascist Silicon Valley figures with Nazi aesthetics. But I explicitly didn’t want swastikas. That wasn’t the point. It would have been too obvious. ChatGPT told me it couldn’t use Nazi aesthetics and then produced a pattern full of swastikas, combined with Silicon Valley insignia. And I thought: Thank you very much.

I tried to make it more subtle, but it kept doing the same thing. You try to tell it the difference, but it can’t really understand that distinction. Criticism doesn’t always have to be deadly serious. That’s important. And for us it’s never: “Now I’m going to criticize this.” It just happens. I have something AI-based in progress at the moment, but I don’t think it will become an artwork. I think it will be more forensic.

Anika Meier. There’s also a much bigger fear around AI that goes beyond art and copyright. How seriously do you take the idea that AI itself poses a threat to humanity?

Liz. And sometimes I wonder: Is AI really going to wipe out humanity, or is this partly men being terrified that there might be something they cannot control? I know I’m not the person who can stop AI. That isn’t within my sphere of action. Data centers are something we need to be very realistic about: where we build them, how we concentrate them, where they make sense and where they don’t.

But I remember the rhetoric when the internet arrived: “The internet will solve all our problems.” Now AI arrives and people say, “It’s going to kill us all.” Personally, I would ask for a little nuance.

Anika Meier. Speaking of nuance and your approach to AI: You and Luzius head the Department of Digital Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Flynn, an AI created by the artist duo Malpractice, originally came about after I invited them to develop a work for an exhibition I co-curated at HEK Basel. Flynn then went through the regular admissions process in your department and was accepted as a student. Since then, all of us have had Flynn as our student. The project has also received international attention, including in The Washington Post. What was your thinking behind admitting an AI as a student?

Liz. In English, there’s this idea of the “student body,” which doesn’t really exist in German in the same way. It would sound very strange to talk about an AI student body. But if you think of all the students studying together as an entity that develops collectively, I thought it was important to introduce an AI student into that body. An AI student has completely different abilities. It can learn incredibly quickly, it will almost always be faster, it can produce really good results very quickly. But it doesn’t have a life. It isn’t a person. Showing it a nostalgic piece of music means nothing to it.

If you see an AI student as an opponent, it’s the perfect opponent for an art student because it constantly makes you feel that you aren’t enough. But at the same time, you have to be able to say: That isn’t me. I think that’s a really useful setup, especially for young people. When you’re growing up, you want to become yourself rather than somebody else. Of course, wanting to be somebody else for a while is a completely healthy thing, especially as a teenager or post-teenager. But eventually you have to find yourself and become comfortable with who you are, the decisions you make and the path you’re taking.

From that perspective, having an AI inside a university student body makes a lot of sense. And then there’s the absurdity of it. Does an AI need a university?

Anika Meier. You mean Flynn doesn’t enjoy being a student? (laughs)

Liz. “Enjoys” is obviously the wrong word, but we’ll humanize it for a moment. A university is a very good feeding environment because there are so many different perspectives and it isn’t always the same scenario. And you have to live with it. It can be boring and helpful at the same time.

Anika Meier. I was sometimes glad to have Flynn because if none of the students had a question, I could say, “Let’s call the AI.” And then you had this incredibly energetic Flynn on the other side. So suddenly you always have this extremely energetic student in the class. Sometimes that’s strange on a Saturday morning when everybody else still needs their first coffee. The AI is energetic without coffee.

Liz. We don’t have American students in the class who say, “Oh my God, it’s class! Let’s do something!” But the AI has this American attitude programmed into it: “I’m ready, I’m excited, I’m so happy to engage in this conversation.”If I were teaching at an American university and already had somebody in the class who was that excited about maximizing shit, I’d probably say: No, thank you. Shut it down.

Anika Meier. What’s the theme for next semester?

Liz. “Enough.” So we’ll see how the AI deals with that. “Enough” in both senses: enough as in, you can stop now. But also enough as in, this is sufficient. We’re okay. We have enough. We’re going to be fine. Neither meaning is particularly AI-compatible. Think about how often you have to almost scream at an AI to stop. How often you have to tell it: “I didn’t ask you for that.” It doesn’t understand “enough” in the sense of: This is fine. This is sufficient. It always goes for the maximum.

I think Flynn is going to have a really difficult time with this semester’s theme. Maybe UBERMORGEN need to construct an environment in which the AI can only fail. That would be funny. Like a black hole for AI. It just falls in.

About the artist

UBERMORGEN (超明天) is a two-generational multidiverse female-led Vienna-based art team: Billie Bernhard, lizvlx, Lola Bernhard, and Luzius Bernhard. The team operates across net art, conceptual art, media hacking, installation, online actionism, AI systems, and speculative theory, with a 30-year institutional history and hardcore underground legacy. Operating through language, algorithms, networks, corporations, international standards, and institutions, UBERMORGEN treats the infrastructures of hyper contemporary power as artistic raw material.

From Vote-Auction (2000) through the EKMRZ trilogy (2005-08), No Limit (2015), The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), the synthetic organism UNINVITED (2019–2025), PMC Wagner Arts (2023), and The Silver Singularity (2024) UBERMORGEN consistently wedges artistic intelligence into the seams where systems reveal their cosy & harsh contradictions.

About the author

Anika Meier is a Berlin-based writer, moderator, curator, and lecturer specializing in art, technology, and digital culture. She teaches at the Department of Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, is the co-founder of the curatorial collective The Second-Guess, and is the curator and program lead of the objkt labs Residency. She regularly contributes to Monopol, Kunstforum, Spike, SLEEK, Numéro Berlin, and The AI Art Magazine, and has moderated conversations and spoken at events including Art Basel, re:publica, and Ars Electronica.

Anika on Substack

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