Egor Kraft: One & Infinite Chairs (1&∞⑁)

In its “Video of the Month” series, the Kunsthalle Dortmund presents current video works by international artists on a monthly basis.

Egor Kraft’s One & Infinite Chairs (1&∞⑁) (2023) makes the chimera visible at the level of linguistic interpretation and breakdown. Kraft describes training a text-to-image model on the prompt, “a single chair on a white background,” and then repeatedly retraining it on its own output. After several iterations, the model gradually loses its ability to produce a chair, yielding instead a para-figurative abstraction. This conceptual machine explores the symptom of recursive feedback and the projected “model collapse” of the near future — where there’s more AI generated content on the internet, and AI loses its primary referent, us. The work positions a classic philosophical query (“what is a chair?”), explored in conceptual art history by Joseph Kosuth, against the fragile ontology of AI: when representation cannibalises itself, and the “idea” falters into a state of disarticulation. (Text: Egor Kraft)

Egor Kraft (映治 克夫斗) is an artist based between Tokyo and Vienna with ties to London and Berlin. His research-informed practice examines the disrupted conditions of contemporary life as products of planetary-scale sociotechnical change. Where much art about technology takes its surface as subject — the screen, the interface, the platform — Kraft goes further back, into the recursive, feedback-driven processes through which technological systems rewrite their own conditions of possibility and, with them, the categories humans use to understand agency, value, and time. His work often requires new vocabulary precisely because the phenomena it addresses have outrun existing description. His multi-award-winning work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and festivals worldwide. He lectures at European and Asian universities, publishes in the field, and speaks at international conferences.