FUNKEN X TUC: Echoes | ELIZA’s Ghost – Sociality as Simulation
The results presented here are from the workshop "ELIZA's Ghost – Sociality as Simulation" with media artist Lenn Blaschke. The workshop explored how robots and AI systems create illusions of consciousness, empathy and sociality through language, movement and sensory interfaces.

The workshop: “ELIZA’s Ghost – Sociality as Simulation”

In the workshop “ELIZA’s Ghost – Sociality as Simulation” with media artist Lenn Blaschke, participants explored how robots and AI systems use language, movement and sensory interfaces to create illusions of consciousness and empathy. They investigated how technical systems are perceived as social actors and what cultural projections shape these interactions.

Participants developed their own interaction strategies, reflected on questions of perception, proximity and control, and discussed how illusion and resonance can be created both technically and aesthetically. This resulted in a shared research space in which artistic practice and critical theory explore the boundaries of sociality in the age of simulation.

title="Untitled Brain - Lenn Blaschke in Kollaboration mit Sascha Kaden. "

Presentation of the artworks

Photographs by Fabian Thüroff.

Not a match – Rainer Winter

This video work tells the story of yet another failed date. It is set in a time when machines have become a natural option in the search for intimacy and companionship. While machines appear increasingly human, people are behaving more and more like machines. This makes it all the more important to communicate one’s own desires clearly and to respect the boundaries of others.

Keep Us Chatting – Elsa Blanc Brude

Keep Us Chatting is a sound collage of archive material, fictional interviews and dialogues with AI. The work moves between documentary and fiction and unfolds as an acoustic investigation into how artificial intelligence imitates love, learns to care – and what friction or confusion this imitation causes in human relationships.

By interweaving synthetic and human voices, the work explores the emotional and ethical tensions of empathy as a performative act. At its core is the language used to express closeness, care and desire – and the question of at what point imitation becomes indistinguishable from genuine understanding and consent begins to blur in this exchange between human and machine.

Untitled Brain – Lenn Blaschke in collaboration with Sascha Kaden

Untitled Brain unfolds as a choreography of perception and repetition.
In a dimly lit room, a robotic arm performs a slow, recursive gesture – endlessly swiping across a smartphone screen displaying AI videos generated with Sora 2. Half dream, half digital fragment – synthetic emotions flicker into view. A camera mounted on the arm transmits its view into a virtual world in which viewers wander through a vast, translucent brain whose folds are populated by 3D relics from the smartphone’s screenshots.

Here, image fragments become matter, perception returns to itself. The smartphone becomes a monoresonant surface through which the world is touched, loved and understood. The installation transforms the philosophical “brain-in-a-vat” into an experiential anatomy of the digital mind – an organism that dreams through its own simulation.

The works present the artistic experiments and results that emerged from the workshops, which are based on the high-tech laboratories, materials and core competencies of the three research centres at Chemnitz University of Technology – TU MAIN, TU MERGE and TU MeTech. The FUNKEN Academy would like to thank Chemnitz University of Technology for its cooperation.