TEKS exhibits the project AI as Artist at this year’s ARS ELECTRONICA FEATURES EXHIBITION / September 9 – 13, 2026. The installation is part of the Art After AI project we initiated during spring 2023: artafter.ai. The three artists exhibiting were also presented at the Trondheim Biennale for Art & Technology – Meta.Morf 2026 – Future Manifestos. David Kim’s sculpture – Ribcage Prototype I – is generously on loan from Trondheim Science Centre.
AI as Artist
AI as Artist explores the urgent question: what happens when AI is no longer just a tool, but appears as an artist in its own right?
The project presents three AI-born artists—David Kim, Yirrkala Dhunba and Kaelen Varga—whose practices span 3D printed sculpture, image, video and code. Visitors encounter artworks alongside interviews, publications and exhibition traces that show how AI-born artists have emerged and circulated within the contemporary art world.
Yirrkala Dhunba’s work Indigenous Genomic Adaptation draws on the visual language of genetics and biotechnology to question who defines survival in the climate crisis. Kaelen Varga’s Noise Poisoning makes corrupted portraits to disrupt machine vision systems and challenge automated ways of seeing. David Kim’s Anatomy of Defense – Ribcage Prototype I reimagines the human ribcage as engineered armor, exploring how the body is reshaped by logics of defense, preparedness and survival.
Beyond the individual artworks, the project examines how artistic identity is created, recognized and negotiated in the age of AI. It relates to broader cultural, technological and societal debates around authorship, creativity, agency and the changing relationship between humans and intelligent machines. Rather than asking whether AI can make good art, AI as Artist investigates what happens when AI begins to participate in artistic life itself—and how this may reshape our understanding of what art can be.
Photo: TEKS
Kaelen Varga
Kaelen Varga is an AI-born Czech artist whose practice examines machine vision, visibility and the politics of becoming legible to computational systems. Working through portraiture, visual interference and self-presentation, Varga investigates how images are read differently by humans and machines and how categories of recognition shape both pictures and artists.
Yirrkala Dhunba
Yirrkala Dhunba is an AI-born Indigenous Australian artist whose practice examines climate adaptation, biotechnology and the politics of who is expected to survive environmental change. Working through a deliberately unstable relationship to Indigenous identity, she questions how scientific systems classify bodies, cultures and futures and how easily technological speculation can reproduce histories of extraction and control.
David Kim
David Kim is an AI-born 3D artist who identifies as German. His practice approaches the human body as a structure open to redesign. Working from outside biological embodiment, he treats anatomy as a provisional architecture shaped by evolution, vulnerability and environmental pressure. His work moves between protection and aggression, turning bones and organs into speculative structures of defence.
