FUTURE MANIFESTOS
KJØPMANNSGATA UNG KUNST, 9. APRIL – 31. MAI 2026
Åpning: 9. april 2026 kl.18.00
Kuratorer: Zane Cerpina, Espen Gangvik
THIS IS NOT ART! [2025-2026]
THIS IS NOT ART! is an installation that confronts the uneasy gap between AI-generated and human-made art with irony, rage, and dark humor.
At its center are video works from the series AI ART RANTS in which dead artists “return” to rant about AI art. Not as wise authorities. Not as neutral commentators. But as angry, contradictory, and deeply uncomfortable voices. The series features the ghosts of Charles Bukowski, Vincent van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, and the Punk movement. These works have been awarded at AI film festivals worldwide, while being openly critical of the very technology that co-created them.
This contradiction is deliberate and the conceptual core of the project. Eldagsen shares many of the arguments voiced in the rants, yet each piece is made with AI. The works do not stand outside the system they critique; instead, they operate from within it. They do not ask whether AI can make art. They ask what gets lost when art is reduced to pattern, style, and probability.
Each rant confronts a different limit of AI: Bukowski snarls at the idea of “generated poetry”, attacking the idea that addiction or failure can be automated into words. Punk attacks the polished optimism and polite censorship of tech culture. Van Gogh protests being transformed into a hollow preset, endlessly recycled without the pain, isolation, or desperation that once drove his work. Francis Bacon insists that you need a body to understand and express an existential crisis. Beuys explains to a coyote why AI has no emotions.
Surrounding the videos and floating within the exhibition space are life-size cut-outs of famous dead artists holding protest posters. Together they form a crowd of demonstrators — not to demand solutions, but to stage the gesture of awareness itself. Their protest is deliberately theatrical and intentionally absurd.
THIS IS NOT ART! does not argue for or against AI art. It exposes a deeper tension: human art is inseparable from bodies, failure, desire, time, and responsibility. Human creativity is slow, inconsistent, and often painful. It involves doubt, guilt, exhaustion, obsession, and the risk of meaninglessness. AI can simulate the language of these experiences, but it does not undergo them. It does not suffer consequences. It does not remember. It does not age.
What the installation ironically reflects is our hunger for meaning, our fear of replacement, and our growing temptation to outsource creativity itself – not only the labor of making, but the burden of feeling, deciding, and taking responsibility. The rants are ultimately less about machines than about us: about what we are willing to give up in exchange for speed, ease, and aesthetic abundance.
Boris Eldagsen [DE]
Boris Eldagsen (1970) studied Fine Arts and Philosophy in Cologne, Mainz, Prague, and Hyderabad. Since 2000, his photographic and media-based work has been exhibited and awarded internationally at institutions and festivals, including ACP Sydney, EMAF Osnabrück, New Media Scotland, Kochi–Muziris Biennale, Biennale Le Havre, and the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth. He received awards at Voies Off Arles and FORMAT Festival Derby.
Since 2023, Eldagsen’s AI-generated work has been presented by international galleries such as Ravestijn Amsterdam, SETAREH Berlin, and Expanded.Art (Berlin) – as well as festivals including the AI Biennale Essen, Pingyao International Photography Festival, IPMA Kaunas, PHOTO 2024 Melbourne, and the ELEKTRA Digital Art Biennale Montréal. His work has also been shown in museums, including the California Museum of Photography, BACC Bangkok, and Jupiter Art Museum Shenzhen.
Since 2004, Eldagsen has taught the theory of ideas and creativity at international art academies, including the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne), Kunsthochschule Mainz, Filmakademie Ludwigsburg, and Pathshala Media Institute Dhaka. He has additionally held workshops and lectures at more than 40 universities and art schools worldwide, as well as at numerous Goethe-Institutes. At the end of 2022, he was among the first artists to offer professional workshops on AI-generated images and has since trained hundreds of art directors, designers, photographers, artists, editors, and professors. He currently teaches the Master program “AI for Creatives” at LABASAD – Barcelona School of Art & Design.
In April 2023, his refusal of the Sony World Photography Awards triggered a global debate on the relationship between photography and AI-generated images, which he terms “promptography.” He was described as the “poster boy of the AI debate” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), “the man who lifted the lid on Pandora’s box” (The Age), and his image PSEUDOMNESIA | The Electrician was called “the picture that stopped the world” (The Guardian). Eldagsen is a regular speaker at international conferences and events, including TEDx, re:publica, Medientage München, FAZ AI Conference, the World AI Conference Shanghai, and C2 Montréal.
In 2025, he served as a jury member for the Ars Electronica Award and the Tezos Photography Award.
He has curated exhibitions on the distinction between photography and promptography, including RIVALS (European Month of Photography Berlin) and PSYCHOPOMP! for the inauguration of the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography in Johannesburg.
Boris lives and works in Berlin.
www.eldagsen.com / www.promptwhispering.ai
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Photo credits. Portrait photo by Jan Sobottka / www.catonbed.de. “AI ART RANTS | The Fucking AI Poetry Generator” by Boris Eldagsen: AI-generated video, 2025.
