Francis Karat
Associated Intelligence
Associated Intelligence
is an interdisciplinary collective of artists who critically examine the application and impact of artificial intelligence. With expertise in film, sound art and product design, the collective develops large-scale installations and conceptual formats at the intersection of art, research and technological innovation. The core themes of their work are AI, memory culture, the exploration of ecological potential and sustainable materials, and the science fiction of social utopias.
Their works and performances have been shown in a wide variety of venues around the world: ZKM Karlsruhe, EKKM Tallinn, Goethe Institute Shanghai, Mousonturm Frankfurt, ISSUE Project Room NY, Badisches Landesmuseum and the Regional Council in Karlsruhe. They were most recently supported by UNESCO City of Media Arts, LBBW, and the Science Office, and were awarded the Grand Prize for New Photography by Canon in Tokyo. Sometimes it seems as if Francis has a personal teleporter – he is everywhere and nowhere, a walking laboratory for everything beyond the ordinary. Francis Karat sees itself as a hybrid collective intelligence, a kind of fluid spherical being that takes on new forms depending on the project.
2o25
installation
public sculptures, orange foil
Karlsruhe is full of statues that tell stories about the past but remain silent about the present.
hermanas intervenes precisely here: selected monuments are wrapped in orange on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The name hermanas commemorates the Mirabal sisters, who were murdered by the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic in 1960 and in whose memory the international day of action was proclaimed.
Violence against women does not affect “others,” but exposes the cracks in an order that likes to describe itself as neutral. The fact that this violence is predominantly perpetrated by men is no coincidence, but a structural symptom. As artists who are read as male, we do not stand outside, but right in the middle, and consciously take the side of those who are attacked. In the Wissenschaftsstadt Karlsruhe, the urban space thus becomes a real-life laboratory in which it becomes visible how a minimal intervention shifts meanings. hermanas is our attempt not only to assert solidarity, but to stubbornly and visibly inscribe it into the city.
2o25
laboratory
lenticular image: 150x170cm
film: 39min, color, cinemascope, 5.1 surround sound
In the former cold storage facility of Karlsruhes slaughterhouse, a speculative experimental field unfolds around thinking in meat.
Between half-unpacked artifacts from a Mars mission and a pop-up lab, a landscape of blue light and digital memory emerges. Here, nothing is exhibited, but rather revealed: the machine thinks back on craftsmanship, and craftsmanship responds with memory.
Project Allpha ties in with the work “Alte Schinken– A Retrospective of the Future” and carries it over into the present of a future lab. Here, the past continues to rot productively: AI films, talking coolers, acoustic echoes of a dying guild. A “revealing of the real” echoes in the humming of the devices – technology as a revelation that does not replace the human, but exposes it. The cold storage room becomes a space for reflection between being and cell structure, muscle and memory. The past rots. The future ferments. The present glows blue – and somewhere, deep in the noise, the world is relearning how to think.
narrator: Fabian Jung
lighting design: Thorsten Schwanninger
photos: Francis Karat
2o25
1st place – KA Technology Art Prize
Welcome to the age of flexible truths, where reality rushes by in endless variations of algorithmic distraction. Memories are puzzles with pieces missing, either consciously or unconsciously. The blurred edges, the distorted contours, the little untruths warm us like old blankets. A patchwork of chance and invented meaning. What happens when this memory is manipulated by AI that ultimately feels more real than our own? What memory are we talking about when even our view is subject to automatic optimisation?
This memory is digitised. We have sorted it into drawers and placed it in the cloud. They are binary codes in a sea of monolithic servers, where nothing belongs to us anymore, where we pay rent, cold as steel and smooth as silicone. What happens to the memory that once arose by chance? Does it become a plaything of those who have power over this data? What if the rent is not paid on time? Will the memory be thrown out onto the street like bulky waste?
What the world has declared irrelevant is the starting point for our work: slides taken by a Franconian vet, holiday photos taken by an Italian migrant worker, family celebrations of people whose names no one remembers anymore. These remnants – saved by chance, almost destroyed – become the raw material for our narrative. ‘Intricate Memories’ is an attempt to expose the fragility of memories and celebrate their plastic transformability. Memories are not temples. They are workshops. Despite everything.
Link to the television report
sculpture consisting of:
5286 generated photo prints (10x15cm, colour)
17 songs
90-second video loop
1 tube television
1 ladder (green))
photos: Francis Karat
2o25
AI model based on the photographic Nordbecken archive by C. Zacharias
612 generated images
27m piano ribbon
3 parts, each 1m x 75cm
photos: Francis Karat
2o25
German Butchery Museum
premiere: 17 April 2025, Bärenkino Böblingen
39 min, colour, Cinemascope, 5.1 surround sound
Alte Schinken moves between memory and design, between craftsmanship and speculative futures for meat. Ham appears here as a preserved relic and at the same time as a projection surface for new forms of life and eating. The installation combines traditional voices, invented stories and digital imagery into a network that not only preserves tradition, but also ferments, remixes and transforms it. Real and artificial blur together, as naturally as microbes in dough or codes in a data set. The result is a multi-layered narrative about food as collective memory, as an interspace between body and technology, between memory and imagination. Not a nostalgic look back, but a lively reflection on what food can be: myth, ritual, blueprint for the future. Alte Schinken invites us to taste the fine line between authenticity and simulation — and to explore the possibilities of a shared future.
Link to the radio and tv report
narrator: Fabian Jung
photos: Francis Karat, film excerpts
2o25
Wimmelbild from: 4-channel AI video, 4K, colour, 2.1 Dolby,12 min, loop
4 chamber stages with approx. 512 objects,
4 benches
In the space between the present and oblivion, places emerge where the pulse of the past permeates the now. Mnemogenesis is the ongoing interplay of memory and new creation – a dance between fading and preserving. In the attic, among the relics of past productions, the abandoned photo archive of the former photo studio is transformed with the help of artificial intelligence into surreal, moving collages that reveal and conceal at the same time. The projected hallucinations reproduce an image of fashion and people and break with the old stage elements. Dreams, fragments, pop and banality.
photos: Francis Karat
2o24
performative reading
premiere on 25 October 2024
at the Ursula Blickle Foundation Lab
We follow writer Francis Karat on his explorations into a new creative era. Swirling in the rabbit hole of language AI, identities drown in a sea of data, and fire is invented for the second time. A performative reading as an odyssey into the infinite spaces of artificial intelligence. Hello, machine, what is it like to be you?
characters:
Francis Karat, the writer (Fabian Jung)
URSL, the AI (Luise Peschko)
Machine designers (Bauer, Bierlein, Breitkopf
Cameraman (Jakob Suranovský)
Technician (Philipp Lawal)
Photographer (Sebastian Heck)
photos: Sebastian Heck
2o24
An exploratory symbiosis of advanced computing technologies and democratic principles. Abstract visual representations guide the viewer through complex data streams, algorithmic patterns and networked systems, abstracted through light, shadow and dynamic forms. The representations symbolise complex neural calculations and dendritic oscillations. A metaphorical narrative and poetic text fragments raise philosophical questions without providing concrete answers. Colour contrasts and flowing movements create an introspective atmosphere, supported by an atmospheric technoid soundtrack. These representations illustrate the interplay of local and global networking. Inspired by findings on interdendritic coupling in neural cells, the installation offers an aesthetic approach to reflecting on democratic principles and their resonance in the digital age.
2-channel synchronous video
4k colour
4.1 stereo
2o24
10 videos with sound on iPads
postcard advertising column stand, three-axis rotatable, 180x90cm
neon lettering 250x120cm dimmable, divided into two parts
stamp machine, filled, 1 stamp = 1 euro, 50x27x27cm Stamps 10x100ct,
motif: ‘Architectural proposals for the Black Forest’, edition of 20 pieces
postcards and postbox, 60x40x27cm
‘Archives and Echos’ is a series of artistic applications of AI. Part I was created with the help of the Baden State Museum's xCurator. At the heart of the project is a collection of postcards with Black Forest motifs from the turn of the century. These postcards are now being set in motion using image-to-video AI tools. A soundtrack between atmosphere and noise, between shellac and tape, brings the historical cards to life. The generated, videographic interpretation is presented on displays in a postcard advertising column stand on the one hand, and as an Instagram post in the sense of ‘digital postcards’ on social media on the other. Video stills are in turn printed on postcards, with a QR code to the video. A stamp machine and a post box hang on the wall. The cards are on display, along with pens. Visitors to the installation are invited to look up addresses and send cards. The stamps show generated architectural proposals for the Black Forest region.
The limited edition was sponsored and produced by DHL.
potos and film stills: Francis Karat
2o24
experimental film, loop, public space 4x6m LED screen, 12 MQ ENZI courtyard furniture orange stereo, HD, colour 10min
AI models hallucinate abstractions of future administration. A futuristic reimagining of Marker's ‘photo novel’. Rhizomes grow and short-circuit, a machine observer notes in his diary and thinks of Deleuze, principles of Digitalisation 4.0 are preached from a loudspeaker. Through a rearrangement of the familiar yellow roadblocks, the story breaks out of the screen and interacts with Kronenplatz.
stills: Francis Karat
FRANCIS KARAT
Degenfeldstraße 15
76131 Karlsruhe
Germany
studio@francis-karat.com
Reprints and reproduction,
even in parts,
only with authors permission
© 2025
