Allegories of Information | Vienna Art Week

The wild boy Victor of Aveyron was captured in a forest in southern France in 1800. At the time he was considered a feral child, completely devoid of almost all socialization. He was impossible to educate until Gaspard Itard, one of the originators of child psychology, took up the challenge and over a painstaking five years made substantial inroads into Victor’s ability to process information and express himself, though he only ever learned two words.

Victor’s case revealed to pedagogues and philosophers the sheer monumentality of “learning” as a process, especially when the subject has little or no pre-conditioning. The exhibition “House of Learning Systems”, Curated by Işın Önol and Robert Punkenhofer for the 21st Vienna Art Week, frames the idea of learning from zero, or even in a hostile environment: too often, education is viewed as a warm and fuzzy interaction and not as an imprinting of processes and practices which are both complex and politicized, and frequently necessitate unlearning.

The artist Atif Akin’s contribution to the show, Teaching a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) the Alphabet (2024), gently displays the struggles the GAN platform has with basic penmanship — the biggest hurdle being that without any concept of a body, or right/left orientation, the program frequently reverses its letters. “AI is no different from a dead rabbit or a houseplant,” Akin says, referring to the two seminal video works that greet the gallery visitor in the gleaming marble and chrome art deco lobby of the ORF Funkhouse (the former headquarters of Austrian radio): Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) and John Baldessari’s Teaching a Plant the Alphabet (1972).

Starting from a point of almost complete futility, the 37 artists in the exhibition present both digital and analog considerations of the mechanisms of learning, as well as the systems which we are required to learn and unlearn.

Critical to learning is the quality of the data we process, and Patricia Olynyk and Adam Hogan’s digital video and soundtrack Black Swan in Three Variations (2025) is a metaphorical depiction of Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s Black Swan Theory (expressed in his book Antifragile), an historical interpretation which explores seemingly unexpected events for which, in hindsight, there was ample forewarning. Olynyk and Hogan utilize the swan as a bellwether signifier, as it undergoes various afflictions representative of climate change and fossil fuel dependence, among other things.

The action transpires in slow motion, a poetic illustration of inaction in the face of disturbing presentiment. The video is screened in the former recording studios of the ORF, so the work can be viewed directly, or through a portal from the sound engineer’s lair, where a second work by Olynyk and Hogan, (Untitled) Vienna Broadcast (2025), a medley of distorted historical radio broadcasts referencing Austria’s own Black Swan events, plays as a second soundtrack to the visual work.

We started to think of what produces ungovernable forces that can be seen only by way of their effects. This is why we started getting feathers and fluids and images of swans and other sculptures to drop into water, then see what happens once they’re in these situations that are intrinsically ungovernable. We were trying to set the conditions in a Studio/Lab situation that would not illustrate Taleb, but would serve as an alibi to the theory. (Patricia Olynyk, Artist)

Adjacent to Olynyk and Hogan is the riotous installation of Eva Davidova, with Danielle McPhatter with EY Intelligent Realities Lab, Vincent Fraley and Lucie Strecker, titled Audience as Virus (2020). This work again considers the quality of data provided for learning — this time for AI platforms. The flickering and frenetic installation, featuring a cacophonous generative soundtrack with leaping and projected avatars is interactive and immersive — live costumed performers gyrate in front of the sensors and ululate into microphones, corralling spectators to do the same, with the express purpose of infecting the algorithm with non-normative information to combat the flattening trend in AI responses.

For me, the interest is to show that, yes, we can unravel part of it. Most importantly, we can intervene, even in small measures. It’s not something that is coming from above. It’s something that comes from us as humanity and everyone can be empowered to intervene and change the direction of these technologies, because they’re our technologies. (Eva Davidova, Artist)

How are certain technologies and lineages of craft and pedagogy sidelined by biases within new branches of knowledge? Ebru Kurbak offers a succinct and convincing case history in Reinventing the Spindle (2023). Apparently flax was first grown in space in 1971, but its further uses were never pursued as extraterrestrial travel expanded — the artist attributes this to the fact that flax is primarily used to weave fabric by indigenous groups and women. It is an interesting argument because fabric production still seems to be a viable industry and could have relevance within the context of space exploration. It certainly gives birth to a witty and poignant exercise in envisioning a very different notion of space travel than the obsessively capitalistic competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Kurbak has produced flaxen yarn in zero gravity conditions, and reenacts the process on video along with props including an astronaut’s uniform and a glovebox with spindles. Hrvoje Hiršl does the opposite. In Dimensions of the Line (2025) he approaches the artist’s process of observation and rendering, much like a nude sketching class except that instead of naked human or a still-life set-up he represents a laser beam — examining different aspects of the fluctuation of the beam through different substances and recording the beam’s interaction with dust particles, yielding a gallery of interpretations of a natural form — displayed as a graph, in detail and close-up: expressing the close relationship between observation, data collection, and art.

While the very notion of “learning systems” is predicated on a modern and technologically focused notion of the dissemination of information (one could argue it emerges from programming and digital interfaces), “The House of Learning Systems” doesn’t harp on AI or the accompanying fears associated with it in the mainstream press. It acknowledges the toolness of technology and the human preconceptions and ramifications that are fallout from any technology.

How does learning emerge? Learning is something that’s a process, it is not something you simply hear and you learn. No, it is an ongoing thing. It is something you also internalize, but then is so difficult to undo. How those systems emerge, how we create those systems, how we learn about those systems, and what is the possibility of thinking differently about those systems? (Işın Önol, co-curator, House of Learning Systems)

If you needed your fix of techno-paranoia, the religiously themed exhibition “Du Sollst Dir Ein Bild Machen” at Künstlerhaus ten minutes walk from the Funkhaus had Deus in Machina (2024) by Philipp Haslbauer, Marco Schmid, and Aljosa Smolic, an AI Jesus who accomplished exactly the flattening which Eva Davidova fears, dispensing limpid advice garnered from a basic data scrape of the gospels without a hint of spiritual innovation.

Exhibiting artists: Atıf Akın • Carlos Amorales • Nadav Assor & Tirtza Even • Fatih Aydoğdu • John Baldessari • Joseph Beuys • Fatma Bucak • Bernhard Cella • Maria José Contreras • Eva Davidova, Danielle McPhatter with EY Intelligent Realities Lab, Vinson Fraley, and Lucie Strecker, APL • Tom Eller • Andreas Greiner • Shilpa Gupta • Miriam Hamann • Hanakam & Schuller • Hrvoje Hiršl • Ashley Hunt • Fatoş İrwen • Richard Jochum • Richard Kaplenig • Ebru Kurbak • Paul Albert Leitner • Jumana Manna • Elisabeth Molin • Amor Muñoz • Antoni Muntadas • Patricia Olynyk & Adam Hogan • Bernd Oppl • Liddy Scheffknecht • Otavio Schipper & Sergio Krakowski • Rodrigo Valenzuela