Image: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt has published a new interview with Hito Steyerl focused on works included in its exhibition 'The World Through AI', extending the institution’s current programming around artificial intelligence, contemporary art and the social conditions shaping both. The article, part of SCHIRN MAG’s ‘3 Fragen’ interview series, was published on 2 July 2026 and is introduced as a conversation between the artist and curator Antonio Somaini.
The interview situates Steyerl within the exhibition and notes that she also spoke at the related symposium 'AI Politics: Slop and Slopaganda'. In the opening framing, the SCHIRN describes the conversation as one about AI as an “surface,” micro-labor and the possibility of significantly reducing AI’s energy consumption. Those themes correspond closely with the publication’s broader July newsletter, which presents the season as one shaped by “art and AI” and highlights content on the exhibition alongside other magazine features.
Steyerl’s answers draw on a long span of work with AI-related systems and models. The interview lists a sequence of projects from the past decade, including 'The City of Broken Windows' (2018), 'Power Plants' (2018), 'This Is the Future' (2019), 'SocialSim' (2020), 'Dancing Mania' (2020), 'Animal Spirits' (2022), 'Contemporary Cave Art' (2022), 'Mechanical Kurds' (2025) and 'The Island' (2025). In the conversation, she says she is currently considering AI as infrastructure and system, and as something that produces what she and others describe as a permeable “surface” on which capital can operate.
A substantial part of the interview shifts from theory to material and geopolitical questions. Steyerl discusses a location in Topusko, Croatia, where a planned AI data center project is described in the interview as a $50 billion initiative. She links the area to displacement, migration routes, environmental conditions and postwar economic hardship, and frames data-center announcements as a kind of performance. The interview presents this as a critique of the language, rituals and investor-facing theatre surrounding large-scale AI infrastructure.
The article also turns to 'Mechanical Kurds' (2025), identified in the SCHIRN text as currently presented in Frankfurt. Steyerl says the work grew out of learning that refugees in camps in the MENA region were hired for digital micro-jobs during the pandemic, and that similar data work took place in Kurdish areas in northern Iraq. She describes difficulties finding workers, a production interrupted by war, and later returning to record their memories after many had already been let go because machines could caption images themselves.
Steyerl further addresses a newly trained base model for AI image generation called 'Lossy'. According to the interview, the model uses only Creative Commons material and publicly accessible data, much of it originally gathered through the 'Spawning' project by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon. She says she and Volker Möllenhoff developed prototypes for a Pixart-alpha diffusion transformer and new quantum-based preprocessing techniques, and that the project showed energy use for training could be cut by up to 75 percent, while inference could be reduced by two-thirds through data-architecture decisions.
The SCHIRN’s July newsletter places the interview in a wider program of articles about AI, queerness and representation, but the Steyerl conversation remains the central feature. The artist’s remarks on computation, labor and the politics of infrastructure end with a claim about model design and scale, underscoring the exhibition’s focus on how AI is built, used and contested in contemporary culture. The interview was published on 2 July 2026 as part of SCHIRN MAG’s ongoing coverage of 'The World Through AI'.
