Fluffy, colorful figures show the way: An endless parade of walking, dancing or hopping figures lights up in all rainbow colors in the “Infinity” projection at the entrance to the “BioMedien” exhibition in the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media (ZKM).

The figures would pass as sympathizers in every "Star Wars" pub or could spread a good mood as digital cousins ​​of Rhenish Lapp clowns.

The artist collective Universal Everything has them randomly created by computer code using human movement patterns, giving the art beings a surprisingly organic vibrancy.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The artificial performers are cleverly chosen as a trustworthy reception committee, since the subtitle of the show could also provoke shudders.

It's about "The age of media with lifelike behavior": that is, about our present and future.

Cuddly characters like in "Infinity" are counter-images of what could be mentally available from the past: the automat woman Olympia, for example, who the romantic ETA Hoffmann had in his story "The Sandman".

Deadly delusion seizes the man who succumbs to a mechanical illusion of the natural.

Sigmund Freud derived his concept of the uncanny from the literary text.

There is now talk of the “Uncanny Valley”, the uncanny valley that has to be traversed when encountering seemingly living objects.

The roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term.

How easy it is for children to make contact, on the other hand, can be experienced in the "BioMedien" show when the youngest interact with the social robot Pepper.

To them, the automaton that tells jokes or plays music on command, co-produced by a French and Japanese company, seems as acceptable a transitional object as a teddy bear – and even petted.

Many users of language assistants are already used to the fact that we can query software systems as if they were people – “Hey Siri!”.

And humanoid robots controlled by artificial neural networks, so-called artificial intelligence (AI), have made media appearances as painters or news anchors for several years.

These attractions are mostly, Pygmalion says hello, robotic women built by men.

With works by around sixty artists, the exhibition in Karlsruhe opens up a much broader field, which ZKM director Peter Weibel curatorially opens with a somewhat bold triple jump: The 19th century was the era of moving machines, the 20th century the of movement media and with the 21st century the age of biomimetic media has dawned.

Life as data processing

But what is life anyway?

Metabolism, irritability, reproductive capacity, growth, self-organization and evolution are counted among its characteristics.

Since the discovery of the genetic code, another definition has prevailed: life as information processing and transmission.

While the Age of Enlightenment was able to imagine living beings as machines, as Offray de La Mettrie did in his treatise "L'homme machine", today analogies are drawn between organisms and computer-based systems.

The one does just as little justice as the other to the complexity of life or the consciousness entangled with the biomass.

But media that behave biomimetically are possible thanks to modern data processing, are attractive for many branches of industry and harbor artistic potential.

The implicit question is always: What makes life – and people?

And how human is the technomimesis?