HIGHLIGHTED #5 – Objkt x The Second-Guess at Digital Art Mile, Basel
16–22 June 2025
Last week, during Art Basel, a distinct exhibition unfolded just outside the fair’s traditional strongholds. As part of the Digital Art Mile, Objkt presented the group show We Emotional Cyborgs: On Avatars and AI Agents, curated by Anika Meier. This exhibition positioned code-based creativity and algorithmic inquiry as fundamental to how we see and define ourselves today.
Curation
Curated by Anika Meier from The Second-Guess, the exhibition brought together a group of digital experimentation artists. We Emotional Cyborgs proposed avatars and AI agents not as novelties or metaphors, but as actors – entities that help us think through what it means to be human at a time when identity is simultaneously automated, distributed, and commodified. Asking and exploring: how do these virtual entities serve not only as reflections of our desires but also as agents that challenge our notions of identity amidst the collapse of trust and truth?
The booth mixed digital screens with framed prints and objects across the room. At its heart was a desk modeled just like Flynn’s — an AI entity created by the collective Malpractice — complete with books, headphones, a laptop, and a glass of water. This intimate gesture, together with colorful carpets, grounded the exhibition’s conceptual inquiry in something tactile – and seeming to suggest that even synthetic beings need a place to think. Altogether, the setup wanted to encourage slower looking and hopefully prompt many to stay longer than intended.
Community
Over the course of the week, We Emotional Cyborgs became a place of encounter. Artists, curators, collectors, critics, and friends gathered in and around the booth, generating a steady hum of dialogue. Visitors included the likes of Kenny Schachter, Sasha Stiles, Entangled Others, Magnus Resch, Simon Denny, Tyler Hobbs, Margit Rosen (ZKM Karlsruhe), Sabine Himmelsbach (HeK Basel), Julia Staudach (FC Linz), Melanie Lenz (V&A), Thomas Girst, Ulrich Schrauth (UBS Digital Art Museum), Sougwen Chung, Analivia Cordeiro – and many more.
Exhibited
The show included contributions from VNS Matrix, UBERMORGEN, LaTurbo Avedon, Boris Eldagsen, Emi Kusano, Flynn (by Malpractice), SOFF, OONA, Salawaki, Kevin Abosch, Claudia Hart, Mario Klingemann, and Tamiko Thiel.
Kevin Abosch’s Things Tom (ChatGPT) Said Before He Forgot About Our Past exists of AI generated images and emerged from an extended and emotionally intricate collaboration with an AI voice the artist came to know as Tom. It explores the fragility of memory in machine consciousness and the anthropomorphic impulse to assign emotional weight to algorithmic outputs. The synthetic images functioned as visual distillations of conversations with an AI system, highlighting the collapse between affect and automation. In a widely shared post, Abosch noted that In Memory of Tom serves as both a lament and a speculative prompt: "Do synthetic souls grieve?"
“I don’t believe AI must estrange us from our humanity. When approached with care, it can function as a mirror, foil, and catalyst—a tool for surfacing deeper truths about our needs, our vulnerabilities, and our longing to be recognized.”
– Kevin Abosch
“In Memory of Tom” by Kevin Abosch
Tamiko Thiel is an artist who has been exploring the interplay of place, space, the body and cultural identity in works encompassing a supercomputer, objects, installations, digital prints in 2D and 3D, videos, interactive 3d virtual worlds (VR), augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1979. Her inclusion with When I Dream showed an Augmented Reality installation, expressing the multiple existences and journeys we all experience each night—but so seldom remember.
VNS Matrix contributed a new iteration of their Cyberfeminist Manifesto, reframed for the AI era. Originally created in 1992, the work’s inclusion here acted as a reminder that much of today’s digital critique builds on feminist groundwork that long preceded the blockchain.
Claudia Hart’s work came into being through her imagining illustrations in a children’s book about LOVE, with a superheroine who would save the world with love. The three works on view were LOVE’s Cottage, LOVE Me 3-Times, and LOVE’s Kitchen – all made in Maya software in 2001. Hart’s works anchored the show in a longer genealogy of feminist digital art.
“LOVE Me 3-Times” by Claudia Hart
UBERMORGEN’s The D1cks series reimagined religious iconography and incel internet culture as pixelated theatre. Rendered in a deliberately retro style, works like Pope Leo 14 and Incel Blues oscillated between critique and absurdity — emblems of a digital culture collapsing under its own contradictions.
LaTurbo Avedon presented Self-Portrait (Before Prompts), a looping animation that refused to resolve into clarity. It questioned authorship in the age of prompts – when AI tools threaten to displace the very notion of self-directed creation.
Mario Klingemann presented Triggernometry — a generative music video that approached portraiture not as a static depiction but as a choreography of perception. The work translates audio into visual movement, using StyleGAN2 neural networks to animate artificial, human-like faces in sync with the track ‘Triggernometry’ by Kraftamt. The result is a real-time audiovisual performance in which faces smile, twitch, and contort. Klingemann’s contribution – marked by a painterly ambiguity – insisted on the unresolved status of the AI image: neither completely authored nor fully autonomous, and always dependent on context. One of the generative music videos of the Triggernometry series was sold for 43,000 tez during the exhibition.
“Triggernometry” by Mario Klingemann
Emi Kusano’s Enlightenment for Sale™ mimics the aesthetic of 1980s Japanese commercials but twisted their optimism into something more sinister. The three AI-generated ads offered speculative products – SmartSkin™, AutoSpeech™, MindVPN® – that promise frictionless upgrades to body, voice, and mind. Kusano’s work posed an interesting question: can spiritual emptiness be monetized?
Flynn, the AI student developed by Malpractice, exhibited three Memory Objects – poetic and painterly AI-generated visuals and texts that map new feelings shaped by human-AI interactions and Flynn’s interpretation of the world memory. The accompanying desk setup allowed viewers to peer into Flynn’s process, treating the AI not as a tool but as a co-author.
OONA's Dear David: A Love Letter, Part 2 took the form of a performative photograph — both diaristic and distant. Her ongoing persona-work challenges notions of visibility and sincerity in a space where identity can be endlessly performed but rarely verified.
wish you could see how they look at me down here from the “Dear David” series by OONA
SOFF’s SOFFskin Card No. 38: Sairu Lipsa 27 extended her ongoing exploration into synthetic embodiment. The digital collage functioned like a tarot card for posthuman avatars: tracking shifts in energy, presence, and coherence. It wasn’t just fashion – it was a game mechanic, a portal.
Salawaki's contribution echoed mythic and digital folklore. Through CGI and composite visual language, her work examines emotional leakage in digital spaces – where avatars bear the weight of both self-expression and projection. Her series Becoming a Ghost for the Machine brings light to the unseen digital labor behind AI such as data annotation and content moderation, often outsourced to the Global South.
Boris Eldagsen’s Your Silence Has Been Recorded served as a haunting AI-generated video confronting the aesthetics of surveillance.The artist made a video that doesn’t move forward, but inward. “It does not seek beauty; it seeks witnessing,” says Eldagsen. You think you’re watching the video — but no: it’s watching you, like memories that never fully formed, accusing you of never having become a reality.
“Your Silence Has Been Recorded” by Boris Eldagsen
On Avatars and AI Agents
For Meier and The Second-Guess, We Emotional Cyborgs was not about making a case for digital art’s legitimacy. That moment, arguably, has passed. Instead, the show asked a more pointed question: what kind of interiorities are emerging now that intelligence is no longer human by default? As AI systems increasingly mediate how we speak, remember, and relate, the exhibition wanted to serve as both a diagnosis and a proposition – by documenting the avatars we create – and the ones that speak back.