Introduction

Progress is being made in the automation of life and a transformation of our social environment. Artificial intelligence is taking over and has the potential to create lifelike forms of existence. While humans are pushing for technological progress, they are on the verge of being replaced. With the exhibition Transformers, the Museum Frieder Burda is breaking new ground by participating in an experiment that transforms the museum into a hybrid and utopian arrangement. This show presents artificial beings that critically inspect the museum and its classic masterpieces. This fiction is a new dialogical situation that plays through the what-if scenario of a radically changed future.

Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke were all influential in changing the traditional expectations of a work of art in their own eras. The juxtaposition of masterpieces by these artists from the collection of Frieder Burda with artificial beings creates multidimensional rooms of experience in the museum to which visitors will have to adjust. This brings life into the museum, and we come one step closer to the metaverse – even if it is not real, it reflects our increasingly artificially transformed world.