Date: Friday 12 September
Time: 19:00 - 21:00
Location: Varia, Gouwstraat 3
Participation: open for all

This artist talk consists of two parts: First, Francis will discuss a series of his works that deal with how society is increasingly reflected by data streams: The project Adversarial.io (2020) allowed to manipulate images so that object recognition would fail on them, the video animation This is the Sentence (2020) explored the dis/embodiment of chat agents. The Data Proxy (2021) imagines a world where everybody is obliged by law to produce large amounts of data and those who don’t succeed get punished, and the Artificial Intelligence Cheat Sheet (2023) observes the discourse around AI through mapping. After discussion, there will be a screening of Hunger’s most recent 20-min video essay Consumer-Off-the-Shelf-Drones (2024), that discusses how image policies of consumer drones change between influencer’s aesthetic image production and war images from Ukraine.

Francis Hunger’s practice combines artistic research and media theory with the capabilities of narration through installations, video essays, radio plays, performance. Currently he co-teaches the class for Emergent Digital Media at the Academy of Visual Arts, Munich and is co-editor of Carrier-Bag.net. In this framework he co-organised conferences such as Art in the Age of Average (2025), Dronomation (2024) and If AI was the answer, what was the question again? (2024). In 2021–2023, Francis Hunger was researcher for the project Training The Archive at Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund and Ludwigforum Aachen critically examining the use of AI, statistics and pattern recognition for art and curating. His Ph.D. at Bauhaus University Weimar developed a media archeological genealogy of database technology and practices. A book titled Running the Data World is in preparation.

More info on Francis can be found here

This talk falls within Varia’s Counter Coloniality Seed research thread, and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.