AI has long become part of the creative everyday in photography, post-production, fashion and advertising. But what is it doing to our visual culture – and to the way we create, read and trust images? This is where SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt’s major summer exhibition The World Through AI comes in.
Around 40 works by some 30 international artists explore the cognitive, psychological, political and ecological dimensions of artificial intelligence. Videos, photographs, sculptures and graphic works examine machine vision, facial recognition, training data, microwork, memory and imagination – looking at a technology whose impact reaches far beyond image generation alone.
The line-up includes Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, Agnieszka Kurant, Harun Farocki, Joan Fontcuberta, Julian Charrière and many more international positions.
Of particular interest to the GoSee world is the section “A Statistical Photorealism.” Generative models trained on billions of images and accompanying texts can now produce deceptively realistic results without optical capture or the recording of light. This challenges one of photography’s fundamental assumptions: its connection to something that actually existed in front of a camera. In eHerbarium, for example, Joan Fontcuberta presents photorealistic images of plants generated with Stable Diffusion – plants that have never existed.
SCHIRN also looks consistently behind the visible result. Timo Arnall turns his attention to the vast data centres and enormous amounts of electricity and water required by digital infrastructures. In Mechanical Kurds, Hito Steyerl addresses the largely invisible human labour behind supposedly autonomous AI systems.
AI Slop and Slopaganda are also part of the exhibition: synthetic, repetitive content flooding social networks and increasingly being deployed for political propaganda. Other works address discriminatory training data, colonial image archives, hallucinations, and the question of whether a different, more open and collectively conceived AI is possible.
The World Through AI is therefore less concerned with whether AI will change our image world. That has already happened. The more compelling question is how we deal with this new visual reality – as photographers, artists, creatives and, ultimately, as viewers.
THE WORLD THROUGH AI
SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt
11 June – 20 September 2026
Hall 2 through 6 September 2026
