A good sign that the summer break is over: events are starting up again. Berlin Art Week and Ars Electronica are just around the corner, but first, C/O Berlin is celebrating the 200th anniversary of photography on August 22, 2026, with a full day of events. So here’s a quick overview of what I’ll be up to over the next few weeks.
22 August 2026
Panel: Looking Forward
5–6:30 pm
200 Years and Counting
C/O Berlin
As part of 200 Years and Counting, celebrating 200 years of photography at C/O Berlin, I’ll be moderating a panel with Florian Ebner, Chief Curator of Photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, author and cultural theorist Annekathrin Kohout, and artist Armin Linke. Following short presentations by the panelists, we’ll look toward the future of photography and discuss how AI, networked images, and digital image cultures are changing our understanding of images, reality, and photographic practice.
As we think about the future and look ahead, what can we learn from past debates around new technologies? Will we still care whether an image was photographed or generated, or will provenance become more important than the category of the image itself? Where does an image come from, how was it made, and in what context? Does the individual image even still matter today? And do we actually need new terms for new kinds of images? Boris Eldagsen uses the term “promptography.” Does this distinction help us, or does it artificially maintain a boundary that is already disappearing? Or perhaps we need that boundary after all?
The keynote that day will be given by Kate Crawford: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop.
More information about the program here.
6 September 2026
Panel & Screening: Who Shapes Culture in the Age of AI?
4–7 pm
silent green
The silent green team invited me to curate an event on AI. This is what I came up with: A short film program and a panel talk explore this question from artistic and theoretical perspectives, examining how generative AI is transforming images, cultural production, and technological infrastructures.
Short Film Program: Unlearning to See
4–6:30 pm
Artists: Kevin Abosch, Crosslucid, Boris Eldagsen, Flynn by Malpractice, Malpractice, Jess Tucker
Who creates images when models create images? Photography, film, and digital images are now produced through prompts, datasets, and models. They are trained, generated, moderated, and circulated through algorithmic systems. Generative film. Deepfakes. An AI-generated opera. Flynn by Malpractice, the world’s first non-human art student.
Panel Talk
5–6:30 pm
Who Shapes Culture in the Age of Generative AI? On Models, Power, and Myths
Speakers: Mat Dryhurst, Anan Fries, Sarah Friend, Jess Tucker. With statements by Simon Denny
Moderator: Anika Meier
Generative AI is fundamentally transforming cultural production. Artists are responding with new modes of practice, while platforms, models, and protocols increasingly shape how images are created, circulated, and perceived. Bringing together five international voices, the panel explores these developments from artistic and theoretical perspectives. How is artistic practice changing under the conditions of generative AI, and what role can artists play in shaping technological systems, cultural infrastructures, and society’s understanding of AI?
More information about the program here.
Tickets: here.
For anyone who would like to do some reading ahead of the event: I’ve previously interviewed several of the artists participating in the panel and/or screening as part of my interview series on digital cultures for SLEEK (unrelated to this event).
Who Shapes Culture? Mat Dryhurst on AI, Protocols, and the Future of Art ↗
Why Is AI Fueling a Return to Spirituality? Anan Fries on Ritual, Techno-Fascism, and Silicon Valley’s AI Mythology ↗
Who Gets to Generate the Female Body with AI? Sarah Friend on Prompt Baby, Consent, and Ownership ↗
Simon Denny: upcoming
9 September 2026
Panel & Book Presentation: Patterns & Politics by Claudia Hart
5–6:30 pm
Francisco Carolinum, Linz
Speakers: Claudia Hart, Andrew Blanton, Anika Meier
Moderator: Julia Staudach
On the occasion of Ars Electronica, Patterns & Politics: Book Launch and Panel brings together Claudia Hart, Andrew Blanton, and Anika Meier for a discussion moderated by curator Julia Staudach about Hart’s artistic practice and her first museum retrospective. Based on the exhibition Patterns & Politics and the publication of the same name, the panel explores Hart’s perspective on technology, visual culture, and power, connecting her decades of work with virtual image production to current debates around AI art.
About my essay in the book: As a child, Claudia Hart wanted one thing above all: to be normal. Her socialist mother didn’t allow Barbie or Mickey Mouse, took her to MoMA and the Met instead, and expected her to explain over dinner why she thought what she thought. Decades later, Hart builds virtual female bodies, makes a pink teddy bear swear, and turns Machiavelli into a children’s book. She has worked with new technologies since the 1990s, but her questions are older: Who has power? Who gets seen? Who decides how women and their bodies are represented? Hart responds with beauty, kitsch, humor, and simulation—and with the hope that technology might make other images and other futures possible. “We had a lot of hope,” she says today. My essay also asks what became of that hope, as the cycles of enthusiasm and rejection that have accompanied digital art for decades repeat themselves with NFTs and AI.
More information about the program here.
11 September 2026
12–4 pm
Artist Talks, Panel & Intermezzo: New Conditions: Art After AI
Berlin Art Week
Berlin Art Week Garten am Kulturforum (Matthäikirchplatz 1)
Mona Stehle, Artistic Director of Berlin Art Week, invited me to help shape the program focusing on AI. There will be an artist talk, two panels, and an intermezzo. The event has not yet been announced, and the program is currently in print. What I can already share:
New Conditions: Art After AI explores how artificial intelligence is changing the conditions under which art is made, experienced, exhibited, and valued. With, among others, Ana María Caballero (Artist), Paul Feigelfeld (Professor of Media Theory, Mozarteum University Salzburg), and Laura Attanasio (Vice President, Pace Gallery).
Moderated by Kimberly Bradley and me.
21 & 22 September 2026
Workshop: Beyond the Artwork: Designing Protocols as Art
Primavera De Filippi & Anika Meier
21–25 September: Protocol Symposium: New Nature
Protocol Institute
Together with Primavera De Filippi, I’m leading a workshop on Protocol Art as part of the Protocol Symposium. The workshop will take place online.
About the workshop: Protocol Art is emerging as a practice in which the artwork is not a finite object but a set of rules that others (human or machine) instantiate into an indefinite number of unique works. From Fluxus event scores and Oulipo constraints to Sol LeWitt's instructional drawings, from on-chain generative systems to autonomous, self-reproducing artworks, the field has been forming for decades, even if it has only recently been named and recognized as such. This workshop convenes artists, curators, scholars, and theorists to engage with Protocol Art.
Across four sessions, participants will learn to distinguish between art made as, with, and about protocols in order to better understand this emerging field. Each participant will come up with a protocol artwork of their own, map existing works onto the framework, and contribute to a shared field glossary published as a workshop output. The workshop is designed not only to teach Protocol Art but also to invite participants to shape the field as it forms.
More information on the program here.
Register for our workshop here.
And to close, something to read:
For KUNSTFORUM (Vol. 312, September 2026), I spoke with Beeple about his journey from internet artist to the museum, digital art beyond the crypto market—and why its history is only just beginning.
In 2021, Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, suddenly became the face of the NFT boom when Christie’s sold his NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 million. Yet Beeple has been working with digital media for more than 25 years and, for almost two decades, has been publishing a new image every day as part of his Everydays project. In May 2026, Regular Animals at the Neue Nationalgalerie marked his first solo exhibition at a German museum.
Five years after the NFT boom, the hype has faded. The questions remain: What role does digital art play in museums and the art market today? Why is it still so often treated as a special case, even though digital images shape our visual present? And what remains of the promise that NFTs would overcome the traditional power structures of the art world?
I hope to see you somewhere, in person or online.
Thank you!
Take care,
Anika
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