How does the constant evolution of technologies (re)shape coexistence among humans, synthetic agents, and their environments? And what emerges from these relations, whether desired or imposed?

Emergent Conditions investigates possible forms of coexistence between human and synthetic agents, inviting speculative narratives about near futures. Bringing together three works at the intersection of artistic and scientific research, the exhibition reflects on the tensions and bridges that emerge from new capacities acquired by synthetic agents, including very human qualities such as memory and voice. The three installations locate technology as something felt in the body, in memory, in the rhythms of attention and perception. Working with compression, trained AI models, and hidden signals, the exhibition puts the phenomenon of emergence as a strategy to come into existence at its center. Drawing from cybernetics and critical AI studies to neuroscience and memory studies, the artists make visible the growing co-constitution of subjectivity between human experience and technological systems.

Amanda E. Metzger proposes compression as a creative tool: to create something new, we need to forget. Moving across computer science, neuroscience, and nascent areas such as biocomputing, the work seeks modes of compression that retain enough to hold everything necessary, while leaving enough out for imagination to fill the gaps. Metzger is artist-in-residence at transmediale of the Digital Art Residency in cooperation with Pro Helvetia.

Laura Benech investigates hidden signals that shape our everyday life. Through a multilayered system, she renders visible what escapes formalisation within experiences of coexistence. Benech is artist-in-residence at transmediale of the coExistence Residency in collaboration with HEK (Basel, Switzerland) and Pleamar (Mar del Plata, Argentina), with the support of Pro Helvetia.

Zeno Gries speculates on the death of Norbert Wiener, originator of cybernetics and so-called grandfather of artificial intelligence. Wiener's monologue weaves together original audio from his lectures with a speculative text, spoken by an AI-generated approximation of his voice. Memories of childhood are interwoven with his thinking: how the nervous system functions like a computational apparatus, how identity is a pattern of potentially reproducible information, how machines can learn.