Conflict of Interest by Mario Klingemann at SLEEK Art Space: Attention Is All You Don’t Need

Conflict of Interest by Mario Klingemann opens at SLEEK Art Space during Gallery Weekend Berlin. AI slop everywhere, endlessly optimized images, and he looks for a retreat: inert images. Anika Meier writes about the conflict of an artist in the age of AI. But what can you do?

The American writer Helen DeWitt turned down one of the best-paid literary prizes in the world because she did not want to meet its requirements. When she was informed in February that she had won the prize, worth 175,000 USD, she had just arrived in a foreign city; she wanted to spend some time there focusing on her writing. She had to find internet, to find access to the internet in that unfamiliar city in the first place, and would then have had to make time for video interviews, podcast recordings, possibly press inquiries, and attendance at a literary festival later in the year. It was too much for her, she declined.

On her blog and on X, she shared her story when the prize winners were finally announced in April. The reactions online were very mixed: some could not believe it, others were understanding, and some artists said they were relieved that someone was finally speaking openly about what is expected of artists.

At the same time, I was working with the German artist Mario Klingemann on his exhibition; we were looking for a title. I asked him what the common thread of his work with artificial intelligence over the past ten years was. Of course, I knew that there is no recognizable style in his work and that this has always been a dilemma for him. Mario sent me a few ideas, among them “Conflict of Interest.” That’s it, I thought, and replied to him.

Meanwhile, I was following the discussions around DeWitt’s decision and the way she explained it publicly. I wrote to Mario that what I find compelling and important about his idea is that a conflict of interest requires shifts in perspective. On social media, we are constantly confronted with POVs, points of view, but more often than not it remains at the level of the first-person perspective, of agreement or outrage.

A few days later, we spoke on the phone. We talked about conflicts of interest. Mario told me about a conflict he has been in for a few years now. “As an artist, I have to work against myself and against everything that already exists,” he said. “But what can you do?” he asked, not expecting an answer from me. He is not alone in his sense of uncertainty.

Who isn’t complaining about being constantly distracted by social media, about AI slop being everywhere? It is becoming easier and easier to make images. Words are enough now. And anyway, Mario said, we simply know too much.

As a teenager, he was already thinking about how to automate parts of himself and hand over seeing to the machine. Since 2007, he has had the tools, through code, to follow those thoughts. Today, 20 years later, he asks what only humans can see, and the machine cannot. He tries to carve out spaces of retreat, which is why he sometimes keeps new works offline, out of any cloud. He does not want them to become training data.

And yes, what can you do when detoxing from AI slop and social media is not so easy? DeWitt’s story shows how costly it can be if you are not willing to spend even more time on self-promotion. What can you do when AI is instrumentalized by politicians and tech oligarchs to generate meme after meme, distracting from actual problems and turning political camps against each other?

The art historian Wolfgang Ullrich has just published a book on this, titled Memocracy: Social Media and Authoritarian Image Politics. Adrian Daub, in What the Valley Calls Ruling, writes about the snide masculinity of the troll, the speed of hype cycles, entrepreneur cosplayers, opinion manipulation, visions of the future, and attention, “the currency of our present,” as he puts it.

“Attention is all you need,” Mario said to me on the phone as he spoke about his new body of work, Weapons of Mass Distraction, which will be shown for the first time in the exhibition at SLEEK Art Space, alongside selected works such as music videos from the past ten years of his work with AI.

Since anyone can now create images with just a few words that could potentially go viral, and since “good” or “interesting” are no longer meaningful criteria for him when evaluating outputs, he is looking for what image-making could become for him again. Producing disturbing images is not a solution for him, because who would want to look at disturbing images, he asked me. Boring images are not a solution either, because that sounds, well, boring. We also moved away from the exhibition title Embrace the Boredom very quickly.

So what might Mario Klingemann’s place of retreat look like? A deserted island where he could be alone for a while as an artist, until AI turns even that into a destination for mass tourism? He wants to go where it hurts, but only to the point where it does not become boring. He wants to make inert images. Images that do not have to perform and therefore are not optimized for attention.

This is what he does in Weapons of Mass Distraction, by deleting within the architecture of the AI model what has been recognized as interesting and therefore amplified. Attention is all you don’t need. “By suppressing or removing obvious activations, the model keeps repairing itself and tries to generate meaning from what little remains. There is no escaping it,” Mario says.

And thanks to his tendency to collect, he has accumulated thousands of found images, which he now looks at, trying to detect patterns. “It’s a Sisyphean task, because our brains are wired in such a way that they get bored as soon as they have recognized the patterns,” he says. But what can you do?

When I saw Weapons of Mass Distraction for the first time, I was by the sea for a few days. I wanted to look out at the water, into the distance, not at one screen and a second screen for once. My eyes kept searching for something to hold on to, something moving, something that was not just water and sky. A ship in the distance, seagulls. It felt the same when I looked at Weapons of Mass Distraction. It was a kind of oscillation between searching for something to hold on to and the feeling of not being exposed to any stimulus at all, because nothing happens.

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Conflict of Interest opens on Monday, April 27 (6–10 pm) at SLEEK Art Space as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin. The exhibition is open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm and Sunday from 11 am to 3 pm.

SLEEK in partnership with Art on Tezos.

On Saturday, May 2 (10 am–1 pm), a champagne breakfast with an artist talk (11–11:30 am) will take place under the title Conflict of Interest: Inert Images vs. Attention Maxxing in the Age of AI Slop. Mario Klingemann in conversation with Anika Meier.