Do you also have to be productive all day and deliver top performance? If you follow Sebastian Schmieg, AI could offer a remedy – but in a different way than expected! The artist describes ‘intelligent’ machines – such as vacuum cleaner robots, smart locks, delivery robots and digital assistants – as “strategic underperformers” that we should take as an example. How? By, for example, pretending that an email was not written by you, but by a digital assistant, and apologizing for it in the email signature: “This email was written by my AI assistant – bear with it, it is doing its best.” If you don’t feel like leaving the house, you just claim that the smart home won’t let you out – based on your health data. Bottom line: we only have to be as good as the smart devices, which, he says, “strategically underperform.” Sebastian Schmieg calls this the “aesthetics of detachment”. (Inke Arns)

Commissioned by Goethe-Instituts of East Asia and Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel for the online exhibition “Hybrid by Nature: Human.Machine.Interaction“.

Sebastian Schmieg investigates the algorithmic circulation of images, texts, and bodies. He creates playful interventions that penetrate the shiny surfaces of our networked society and explore the realities that lie behind them. Schmiegworks in a wide range of media including video, website, installation, artist book, custom software, lecture performance, game show, and delivery service.
Schmieg studied at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally at Kunsthalle Zürich, KW Berlin, The Photographers’ Gallery London, MdbK Leipzig, HEK Basel, and Chronus Art Center Shanghai. Schmieg is a professor for interface design at HTW Dresden. He is based in Berlin.