DAI salutes brilliant Sepideh Behruzian (DAI, 2020), who has been selected as one of four international fellows for the prestigious Mensch–Maschine Fellowship at E-WERK Luckenwalde, in partnership with JUNGE AKADEMIE (Akademie der Künste) and the E.ON Foundation. The 2026 residency, focuses on "Mechanic Ghosts and Entangled Realities". The selected artists work at E-WERK or AdK Berlin, with a new 2026 partnership including Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. The programme supports projects working at the intersection of art, energy, and ecology, with a thematic focus on the human–machine relation.
"The relationship between “natural” life and machines is complex and entangled, and has been the subject of art and artistic practice since the beginning of the modern Anthropocene. However, this relationship has been appropriated by the accelerated development of technologies such as artificial intelligence, extractivist ideologies, and hypercapitalism. The Mensch Maschine programme seeks to return to an idea of intelligence, both human and “natural” in the arts, that allows us to explore technological future scenarios from an ecological perspective that places the planet at the center. In this context, AI is not considered artificial or intelligent, but rather as Scholar Kate Crawford suggests “both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuels, human labor, infrastructure, logistics, history, and classifications” (2021, Crawford). The programme supports projects working at the intersection art, energy and ecology, which integrate realities, stories, histories, and myths from Europe and around the world, that address the social, political, natural, and cultural challenges of our time. How can we acknowledge and integrate the ghosts and ruins of our petro-cultural history in order to shape a regenerative future?"
About Sepideh Behruzian