Ivonne Thein's artworks reflect the current body images of a digital culture that is currently undergoing fundamental change due to extensive technologization. In recent years, the use of automated, non-human recordings and artificial intelligence (AI) has placed the question of imitating nature anew, and thus the relationship between art, technology, and the body, at the center of artistic as well as design discourses. New technologies are now profoundly shaping both the physical body and its virtual representations in the visual culture of our time. What evidence do the abstracting body landscapes generated by Ivonne Thein in cooperation with an AI provide us? Since these fragmented body images fascinate and disturb us in equal measure through their surreal syntheses and digital abstractions.

Ivonne Thein first trained an AI with stock photography of diverse body images. (Re-)combination, mutation, and selection of forms occur automatically in the deep layers of the artificial neural network, which the artist uses as a non-human collaborator in the following image processing. The AI thereby imitates role models and simulates creativity, which until now has been considered an intellectual activity and outstanding human ability. In the end, the body images generated by the AI come intrusively close to us in the exhibition space since they no longer remain pure data sets on flat screens (for example, as prints or video loops) but are also concretized by the artist as silicone sculpture in the real space of the exhibition. In this way, they objectify the human body as raw material for manipulations and modeling of all kinds and question the new relationship between the forms of nature, their pictorial imitation, and the technologized artistic form languages of our time. In it, Ivonne Thein deals impressively and in a transdisciplinary way with the current concept of body image in the age of cultures of digitality.

About the artist:
Ivonne Thein (Berlin) is a multidisciplinary artist whose photographs, videos, sculptures and mixed media installations have been shown in galleries and museums such as Fotomuseum Winterthur, CO Berlin, ACP Sydney, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Lentos Linz and Amelie A. Wallace Gallery NY have been shown. She has received awards and grants from CO Berlin, ifa, Stiftung Kunstfonds, VG Bildkunst and BBK Bundesverband.