Stefan Karrer is one of the artists-in-residence for the 2025 Digital Art Residency in collaboration with Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. His ongoing project, The Prompt Engineer, examines AI through the lens of human contribution, focusing on how people interact with generative AI and the broader political, economic, and cultural systems surrounding them.
On the Discord servers of Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and OpenAI he observes the emerging poetics of prompting, and the practice of Prompt Engineering as a new kind of Magic. As a lurker in the "Forest of Discord", he studies how the user discussions reflect (and subvert) the narratives and myths spread by those who own and deploy AI Systems including AGI, AI Safety, Abundance, Latent Space.
From the material gathered (text, screenshots, UI elements, sounds) he creates his own poetic formations which build toward a multi-layered and humorous portrait of the current "AI summer" through the perspective of human users. During his residency, Stefan plans to experiment with elements of Comics, Concrete Poetry, Erasure Poetry, Fantasy, Hypertext, Standup Comedy and Statistics, and explore performative and installative modes of presentation.
jury
Johannes Bruder, Guilia Bini, Anna-Lena Panter
credits
The Digital Art Residency is a cooperation between transmediale and Pro Helvetia. transmediale has been funded as a cultural institution of excellence by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) since 2004.