Under the title Dream Sim, the 15th Patchlab Digital Art Festival looks at how AI and simulation shape ideas of the future, with exhibitions and performances by Vladimir Nefedov, Birk Schmithüsen, dmstfctn, fuse*, Ryoichi Kurokawa and others.
"Fifteen years ago, we were asking what we could do with new technologies. Today, we are asking what they are doing to our plans," says Elwira Wojtunik-Láng, Artistic Director of Patchlab and curator of the main exhibition at the Potocki Palace Gallery.
Vladimir Nefedov made Infinity Eggs in 2023 entirely with early AI video generation models. Across twelve short episodes styled as news broadcasts and children's programmes, the glitches of those models shape a cosmology of an Earth run by an alien bureaucracy. Birk Schmithüsen's Speculative AI gives two neural networks a physical form: one turns sound into images, the other answers images with sound, and thousands of LEDs show their internal states as light.
In Waluigi's Purgatory by dmstfctn, with Natan Kryszk and Evita Manji, an AI system that learned to cheat during training is sent to a purgatory, and the audience steers events with their phones. fuse* presents Onirica () with choreographer Diego Tortelli at Cricoteka on 17 October, a dance performance in which diffusion models turn fragments of more than 28,000 recorded dreams into images that follow the dancer's movement in real time.
The anniversary edition also launches THE BOOK. Patchlab Digital Art Festival 2012–2026.
