C R O S S L U C I D

An artist collective (est. 2018) that engages in highly collaborative cross-disciplinary projects in co-evolution with technology.

Their work and research converges around the exploration of the self as a network; intimacy and the potential for pleasurable actualization through the digital sphere, and the re-imagination of our alliances with technology seen as part of a sympoietic biosphere and universal post-material consciousness.

Through filmmaking, poetic Artificial Intelligence, multi-layered techniques of collage, assemblage and experience-led interventions they create scenarios and build experiential formats that instigate prototyping and rehearsing potential futures and progressing metamodern values.

Their work has been exhibited and showcased by iMAL, Vellum LA, EPOCH.Gallery, The Osaka Museum of Fine Arts, SXSW, Francisco Carolinum Linz, Expanded.Art, Art Encounters Biennial, MuseumsQuartier Wien, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, arebyte London, Chronus Art Center Shanghai, AI Biennial Germany, NOWNESS, Google Arts & Culture, wrong biennial, Garage Rotterdam, Art Basel Miami, The Lobkowicz Palace and ARD Culture amongst others.

Crosslucid’s work has been published in international books and magazines: ZEIT, Dazed & Confused, CLOT, SO-FAR, Institute of Network Cultures, Modern Weekly, Elephant, British Journal of Photography, Slanted, and Kunstforum International.

Currently, they are working on their first full length sci-fi documentary 'Translucid' and Osmotic AI, a tool for practitioners for communal healing, both in co-creation with commercial and self-trained AI systems.

Upcoming, Current & Past Exhibitions, Events & Residencies

13–NOV–2023 - FEB 2024 Dwellers Between The Waters. Foldings.
Public Art Commission
MQ ART BOXat MuseumsQuartier Wien
part of Vienna Art Week

in collaboration with Natalia Sykorova
Curator: Elisabeth Hajek

The setting in the MQ Art Box is reminiscent of an aquarium, with the rhizome-like sculptures seeming to have escaped from the virtual world of film. They establish a connection between realities and entities and address the film’s multifocal narrative structure, in which human and non-human beings, artefacts, animals, plants, spirits, forebears, gods, organisms, and technical protheses are interwoven. Linked together in a visual-narrative universe, they share apocalyptic fears and existential hopes.

NOV–2023 - 2024 For Data You Are, And To Data You Shall Return

Group Show | virtual space
Curators: Rebecca Edwards (arebyte London) & BI Xin (Chronus Art Center Shanghai)

with:
Alice Yuan Zhang, CROSSLUCID, Iris QU Xiaoyu, Rebecca Allen, Ruini Shi, April Lin, XU Haomin

For Data You Are, And To Data You Shall Return’ looks at the traces of data that we leave behind on the web and technological devices, examining their digital death, renewal and reincarnation.

Through generative, video, and gamified works, the exhibition challenges the traditional boundaries of the online and offline world, showing their interconnectedness through the mediation of the screen.

Visitors contribute their data as they interact with the exhibition, leaving a digital footprint that influences their experience and leaves traces for others.

This circular relationship between life and technology encompasses both the physical and spiritual dimensions, albeit with a unique twist - the exhibition itself is decaying.

NOV–2023 - DEC-2024 Are You For Real: Rituals of Nascent Worlds

Group Show | virtual space | Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa)
Curators: Giulia Bini & Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás

with:
Sahej Rahal, Moritz Jekat, CROSSLUCID, Hollow, Lucile Olympe Haute,
Jelena Viskovic & Federico Campagna,
Nolan Oswald Dennis

Are you for real? It would be an odd question to ask if we didn’t have technologies at hand capable not only of representing but generating realities. Computation propels a shift in our understanding of what “real” is, and how it should be distinguished from the merely possible, the virtual, and the actual.

Realities can be constructed by calculating machines as much as by the scientific activity that shapes how we perceive our digital and analog life-worlds. The understanding that computation and scientific investigation are two main forces that define our realities lies at the core of ARE YOU FOR REAL Phase 2.

The featured artists use computers as tools, as collaborators, and as agents of world creation. They increasingly base their works on the results of scientific research, while also borrowing and transforming its methods in their investigations.

13–NOV–2023 Talk & Screening at Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and Culture / NYU Shanghai
conversation with Bogna Konior

01–NOV–2023
META CITY Architecture Biennale. Pavillion Design (The Sublimator) & Group Exhibition

Group Show | Meta City
Curators: Hans Ulrich Obrist & Venus Lau

with:
Cao Fei, CROSSLUCID, Fei Yining, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Lee Pivnik, Liam Young, Michael Wang, Lu Pingyuan & Wu Ziyang

“The real economy and the virtual economy have ushered in a high degree of integration, and the boundary between the digital world and the real world has gradually disappeared. Everything is the entrance to the virtual world and coexists in virtual reality. Yuanbang is a surreal virtual city that truly deeply integrates art, culture, design, fashion and science and technology. It is an immersive digital peach blossom source that integrates idealism, futurism and romanticism.

The original intention of the Biennale is not to assert and solidify the binary opposition between the metaverse and physical space, but to unravel the virtual space from different ideological perspectives - such as the ‘tilt function’ proposed by French architect Claude Parent and Italian philosopher Paul Virilio (The Function of the Oblique) to the ‘deep time humility’ of the philosopher Roman Krznaric - with thinking extending to ‘beyond gravity’, ‘dimensional jumps’ &‘worlding’

This exhibition is an open experimental project to reflect on how technology can reshape people's self, group memory, cultural identity, spatial cognition and time consciousness.

Modern Weekly Nov 2023

21–SEPT–2023 - 30-SEPT-2023
DWELLERS BETWEEN THE WATERS:
Scenes From The Film.

Solo Show | Expanded.Art | Berlin
Curator: Anika Meier

29-NOV 2023 NEW MYSTICS Gemini Edition
A new series of multi-authored texts focusing on artist duos, written in collaboration with artists and custom language models.

Curator: Alice Bucknell

Featuring artist duos and collaboratives: Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė, CROSSLUCID, Sadia Pineda Hameed & Beau W Beakhouse, and Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser.

This text plummets deep into the undercurrents of metamorphic entities that twist and swirl in the tendrils of mitochondrial love. Collaboratively written with a NM’s custom language model trained on the latent lexicon of shared and emerging words and worlds, this text centers around their latest offering, Dwellers Between The Waters, before composting itself into something alien, happening, not yet tangible, but always becoming. ✨

What does a 30-million-year old fossil of the death-grip of a fungus-infected ant have to do with the future-careening imagery hallucinated by emergent AI models?

Read on to find out.

14-OCT-2023 HYPEROBJECTS CHAPTER III: SYNCRETISM
Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan

SYNCRETISM will present to the public new Hyperobjects inspired by the merge of two apparently distant realities, Babylonian brutalist architectures and Bio-inspired computationally grown objects. This symbiosis is designed to provoke contemporary human thinking and to put us in a state of pre-knowledge and mental reset.

For the occasion, the Berlin-based duo CROSSLUCID will present scenes of their constantly in process project "Dwellers between the Waters", a multi-channel installation AI-driven that combines artificial intelligence with the practice of magic and alchemy. The aim of the Artwork is to seek possible solutions in response to the traumas of the contemporary anthropos.

At the same time, the artist and performer Mauro Ventura presents ADAMASTORA (produced with Francisco Antão): an immersive lore that recontextualizes water nymphs, sirens, and monsters with a closed-mouth chant, luring us into the abyssal self, exploring our fears for prisoned inner voices.

06-SEPT-2023 - 28-JAN-2024
EXTENSIONS OF SELF: An Exchange of Human and Artificial Intelligence

Group Show | FC Carolinum, Linz
Curator: Eva Fischer

The title of the exhibition "Extensions of Self" refers to a conversation between artist Stephanie Dinkins and the Black social robot Bina48, who asks her if robots should be considered an extension of human existence.
What are the inherent rights of a chatbot like Bina48 and why should it have them or not?

Eleven international positions negotiate how artificial intelligence relates to us humans, whether we understand its underlying systems and logics, and what our own authorship is like.

"Extensions of Self" explores the possibility of ultimately finding a new approach to coping with the trauma of the current Anthropocene through an exchange with artificial intelligence, thus embarking on a path of healing.

with:
Stephanie Dinkins, CROSSLUCID, Emanuel Gollob, Holly Herndon + Mat Dryhurst, ResonAIte feat. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Michael Wallinger, Mimi Onuoha, Morehshin Allahyari, Silke Grabinger, Sougwen Chung & Claudia Larcher

06-JULY-2023 - 07-JULY-2023 AI FOR GOOD Global Summit, Geneva
Curators: Jovanka von Wilsdorf & David Hanson

The goal of AI for Good is to identify practical applications of AI to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and scale those solutions for global impact. It’s the leading action-oriented, global & inclusive United Nations platform on AI.

03-JULY–2023 - 09-JULY-2023
Un-Conference AI Palace
Curator: Primavera Di Filippi

A small, curated group of builders, entrepreneurs, hackers, artists, and researchers gathers for a 7-day unconference focused on building new infrastructure, business models, and institutions for the AI economy, especially more public, open-source and decentralized forms of AI.

What are the new (and old) business models of AI?
What would it look like to open-source or decentralize layers of the stack?
What new insitutions will shape the future of the AI industry?

“During the 7-day residency we will probe these and other questions, challenging each other’s assumptions and our own assumptions. We’ll debate guidelines, philosophies, business models, and standards. We might even build prototypes, write white papers, and launch new companies.”

AUGUST–2023 Wild Alchemy
Magazine Feature
Aether Edition

Wild Alchemy is a multi-sensory, augmented-reality journal from a global collective of artists, academic researchers and occult practitioners, whose transdisciplinary practice explores nature, science and esoterica at the intersection of plants, planets and people.

In a radical new format to honour the aether element, this issue is an augmented-reality playable artwork and the first of its kind.

Giant 700 x 1000mm (B1) double-sided print.

The 72 journal pages serveas 72 augmented-reality images linking to audio-visual content from our global collective of artists and practitioners.

JULY–2023
Artist-in-Residence
Gazell.iO

JUNE / JULY / OCT–2023
Artist-in-Residence
MuseumsQuartier | Vienna

MAY–2023
Artist-in-Residence
Rupert Residency | Vilnius

19–MAY–2023 - 16-JULY-2023
MY RHINO IS NOT A MYTH: art.science fictions.

Group Show | Biennal of Contemporary Art | Timisoara
Curator: Adrian Notz

The biennial’s title is inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s famous Rhinocerus woodcut, an imaginative description of a rhino since the artist-scientist never saw one. Ganda, by its Gujarati name, was a diplomatic gift that caused a sensation in all the places it arrived before its tragic end in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, his part-fiction, part-story-told depiction informed numerous artistic works and scientific publications into the 18th century.

Following connections across geographies and histories, ‘My Rhino is Not a Myth’ quotes from the play Rhinocéros by Eugène Ionesco. A response to the rise of authoritarian regimes and complicity, inhabitants of a village gradually turn into rhinoceroses in the story, while only one character is constantly being told “Your rhinoceros is a myth!”.

The title reclaims the power to resist conformity and relies on the imaginative abilities of art and science to envision other futures. The biennial transforms the rhino into a vessel: a non-human being inhabiting multiple dimensions with different degrees of truth and reality, bleeding into our world.

30–APRIL–2023 - 22-MAY-2023
HOTEL BLUE

Group Show | Immersive Experience at SVStudios x Vellum LA
Curator: Alice Scope

Hotel Blue explores the concept of home and community for the future “us” - the virtual beings of tomorrow. The exhibition features international works by eight women, non binary, and queer artists whose works elaborate on how the body is used to give material form to an idea that has no form and space elsewhere in society. As we become more immersed and dependent on rapidly evolving technology, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the boundaries between humans and machines.

Post-human bodies are never at home. They live in common spaces online, and these spaces, often temporary and fleeting, resemble hotels more so than homes. The proliferation of self centered technology pushes our society to put forward ‘improved’ versions of ourselves, giving way to a multitude of individualized personas. But can this multitude live as a community? And if so, where would they live? What is home for virtual beings?

with:
Stacie Ant, Vitória Cribb, CROSSLUCID, Harriet Davey, Huntrezz, Keiken, Wednesday Kim, Paola Pinna

11–FEB–2023 - 15-JUNE-2023
XENOSPACE

Group Show
Epoch Gallery | Virtual Exhibition
Curator: Peter Wu

XENOSPACE is a ground-breaking and experimental virtual exhibition that features seven artists exploring the collaborative boundaries of artificial intelligence and machine learning in their creative processes.

The title “XENOSPACE” alludes to an unusual or unfamiliar environment. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are transported to the virtual “non-space” of a server room. This 360-degree panorama serves as the “initial image” that is processed through Stable Diffusion, generating the subsequent AI-assisted environments that serve as the backdrop for the artworks. As viewers navigate the installations, they will experience a disorienting and uncanny repetition that challenges their familiar frame of reference.

XENOSPACE responds to a significant moment in the field, as it reflects on the growing relationship between humans and machines and the impact of AI on creative expression. The exhibition serves as a benchmark, showcasing the expansive collaborative potential of AI and machine learning in contemporary art practices and exhibition building.

with:
Connie Bakshi, Ana María Caballero, CROSSLUCID, Libby Heaney, Harvey Moon, Eddie Wong, Ziyang Wu & Mark Ramos

04-FEB–2023 - 09-APRIL-2023
Screen, Screen on my Phone, Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

Group Show
Garage Rotterdam
Curator: Bogomir Doringer

The exhibition focuses on the search for an own identity in which people have used different technologies - from dark reflective water to luxurious mirrors on walls. Today our phone is an object that reflects a "clear" image of ourselves.

The hidden and rapidly developing cameras behind these scenes show us distorted, modified and embellished faces, the protagonists of contemporary fairy tales.

with:
Lena Kuzmich, Alli Coates + Signe Pierce, CROSSLUCID, Mamali Shafahi & Rachel Maclean

26–JAN–2023 - 13-FEB-2023
Algorithmic Empathy. The Promises of AI

Group Show
Expanded.Art x Vertical CryptoArt | Berlin
Curator: Anika Meier

16 artists explore the vast potential of future relationships between AI and creative expression to hypothesize on the not-so-distant future.

In a world where technological advancements happen in the blink of an eye, AI is being pointed to in the cultural zeitgeist as an example of a potentially bleak and ominous future. It is worth considering, however, the ways computers and machine learning can push forward creativity, human connection and philosophical dialogues.

with:
Anna Condo, CROSSLUCID, Marco DeAngelis, Olivera Đurđević, FAR, Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek, Veronica Kuri, Lars Nagler, Skye Nicolas, Chiara Passa, Ellie Pritts, Phillip Toledano, Mikey Woodbridge & Ezra Shibboleth, Ziyang Wu & Kira Xonorika

26–JAN–2023 - 13-FEB-2023
Postgender. NFT Biennal

Group Show
Vellum LA x Unicorn DAO | Los Angeles
Curators: Alice Scope & Chanel Verdult

Human after all. We are the new undefined state of gender, one that presents fluid utopic dynamics in shaping oneness. What if we, as a culture, moved past traditional gender roles into new states of identity? What would we call it?

As technology and art pave the way for our identities which thrive in safe spaces beyond our physical bodies into celestial realms of avatar gender bending sources. We are anything we wish to be. The exhibition explores what it means for us as a collective of progressive individuals to develop a new language to overcome the paradigms of archaic gendered narratives.

The exhibition invites local and global audiences alike to engage with their practices through a physical exhibition at Vellum LA on Melrose and digitally through the NFT Biennial Metaverse.

with:
CROSSLUCID, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Evelyn Bencicova, Huntrezz, Jazzelle x Nick Knight, Operator, Martina Menegon, Nicole Ruggiero & Tabitha Swanson

01-SEPT–2022
Seminar Series
Artificial Life, AI, Art and Altered Nature
Chapter 3: more-than-human assemblage

Aiiiii Art Center, Computational Media and Arts, HKUST(GZ), Chronus Art Center
Curators: WU Ziwei, LI Xi, BI Xin, CAO Jiamin

The term "Artificial Life" was coined by computer scientist Christopher Langton in 1987. However, the notion and practices of "artificial life" are far predated. This topic has long been an interest of scientists and artists, who have been exploring the fundamental principles of life and attempting to think life in the context of an artificial system.

In recent times, Artificial Intelligence algorithms have been widely implemented in various interdisciplinary fields including Computational Biology and Synthetic Biology. Through synthesising or simulating hardware, software, and wetware, technology restructures and represents the characteristics of the natural living system. Meanwhile, in the increasingly participatory interactions between humans and non-human entities, the technological assemblage also behaves like a living organism, performing in the collaboration and cohabitation with environment.

How can life be reimagined in the process of the transition? What is the aesthetics in Artificial Intelligence and the realm of life? How can artificial beings perform in symbiosis with the community and even influence society and culture? How do we perceive the ethical and moral issues?

with:
CROSSLUCID, Shuyi CAO, Yiou Penelope Peng

30-NOV–2022
Virtually Real. NFT Auction

Group Show
VAN HAM Auction House | Cologne
Curator: Fernanda Parente (Rosy DX)

with:
Banz & Bowinkel, CROSSLUCID, Damjanski, Gretta Louw, Jonas Lund, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Martina Menegon, Sabrina Ratté, Nicole Ruggiero & UBERMORGEN

30-NOV–2022
PixelParty
S01/E03 (in German)

Episode 3: Artificial Intelligences

Artists use artificial intelligence to create new works and aesthetics: the unusual aesthetics of artificial neural networks are so formative that they are already being discussed as the next style of contemporary art. Laura and Nilz meet Crosslucid, who use AI to search for a new spirituality and sensuality. Jascha Viehstädt, Erik Kundt and Raymond Liew Jin Pin combine contemporary dance with algorithms and Philipp Fussenegger and Adella Roth stage the future of sexuality in a cyber brothel.

ARD Kultur
Moderated by: Laura Kampf and Nilz Bokelberg
Based on an idea by: Alain Bieber
Written and Directed by: Simon Ruschmeyer

ARD Mediathek | online

22-APRIL–2022 - 08-JUNE-2022
Spiel-Räume: AI Biennal Essen

Group Show
Forum Kunst & Architektur, Essen
Curator: Alain Bieber

How creative is artificial intelligence? How do artists interact with it? And what works can be created in the process? The exhibition at Forum Kunst und Architektur looks at new spaces of action, places of encounter and interactions between man and machine. It also highlights design opportunities: unusual perspectives to shape and negotiate the future.

with:
Havva Ayvalik, Banz & Bowinkel, Katrin Brackmann, Tega Brain, Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén, Tim Cierpiszewski, CROSSLUCID, Moritz Simon Geist, Anja Husmann, Dagmar Schenk-Güllich, Sophia Weber & Philipp Harms & André Chi Sing Yuen

22-OCT–2021 - 06-FEB-2022
SWIPE RIGHT! DATA, DATING, DESIRE

Group Show
iMAL, Art Center for Digital Cultures & Technology, Brussels
Curator: Valentina Peri

What does it mean to love in the digital age? How are digital interfaces reshaping our personal relationships? What do new technologies imply for the future of the romantic sphere? How do screens affect our sexual intimacy and our desire for connection?  

In terms of romance and intimacy, Internet and smartphones have generated new complexities that we are still trying to figure out.  All these phenomena became hot-button in March 2020, when a global pandemic placed millions of people under total lockdown, enforcing to reconfigure most of social activities online and in a technology-mediated form. From online working to online partying, humans all over the planet tried to play with the discontents of social distancing, and to live the no-contact reality as the new normal. 

This forced self-isolation and touch-less condition proved to be a significant driver for many people to move their romantic lives into the digital realm, inspiring new ways of courting, dating and catching, for both confirmed and novice users. 

By bringing together the work of several international and Belgian artists, the exhibition SWIPE RIGHT! Data, Dating, Desire attempts to explore new directions in contemporary romance and map the unprecedented connections between desire, emotion, technology, and economy in the post-pandemic world. 

with:
!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Adam Basanta, CROSSLUCID, Dries Depoorter, Elisa Giardina Papa, Tom Galle, John Yuyi & Moises Sanabria, Noemi Iglesias, Lancel/Maat, Joana Moll, Ingo Niermann & The Army Of Love, Eva Ostrowska, Dani Ploeger, Addie Wagenknecht & Pablo Garcia

30-NOV–2022
CONTROL THE VIRUS. Vol 03

Group Show
Virtual Exhibition
Curators: Martin Mayorga, Vanessa Murrell & Zaiba Jabbar

Originally conceived by DATEAGLE ART in 2017 as “Spread the Virus”, the series’ title has evolved with its context, beckoning in an epoque of virality that has rapidly become globally pervasive. With both organisers having tested positive for the virus in 2020, the projects’ responses to fervent multiplication reflect a creative community who have been touched both internally and externally by the pandemic.

The previous two editions confronted the notion that digitalisation is a voracious infectious agent and that none of the participating artists are immune. The change in language, from “spread” to “control,” foregrounds the exhibition as an exercise in restraint. To log on or plug off might be one of the only means of exerting control over the fractious state of the world.

with:
Molly Soda, Pinar Yoldas, Natalia Styuk, CROSSLUCID, Kumbirai Makumbe, Taina Cruz, Corie McGowan, Sofia Crespom Debora Silva, Danielle Brathwaite Shirley, Maria Mahfooz & Sybil Montet

Press

2021-2023

MetaCity Biennale
Interview

A Collaps Of Our World As We Know It: The Promises and The Future of AI
Interview
Expanded.Art | by Anika Meier

Osmotic AI: *CROSS*-LUCID-DREAM-(ING)OF-(DIGITAL-)HEALING
Interview
So-Far | by Oxi Peng

On Desire Flowing Through The Wires
Interview
CLOT Magazine | by Giulia Ottavia Frattini

SWIPE RIGHT ! Data, Dating, Desire @iMAL – a lil’ review
Institute of Networked Cultures | by Maisa Imamovic

Slanted #37 AI | 5000 unique AI generated covers
Magazine Culture | by Jeremy Leslie

Redeye Magazine
Interview
by Donald Gjoka

Landscapes: a conversation on AI, alchemy and art
Interview
Cashmere Radio | by Giacomo Gianetta

CROSSLUCID collaborate with AI to visualise the mysterious life forms of the future
British Journal Of Photography | by Charmaine Li

@CROSSLUCID 2024 (Sylwana Zybura & Tomas C. Toth)