ALEXANDER HAHN

The highly topical artwork "Getting Nowhere" documents a conversation with an early form of artificial intelligence, the chatbot ELIZA.

For almost half a century, Swiss artist Alexander Hahn (b. 1954) has created experimental video works and installations in which banal everyday experiences are transformed into profound philosophical reflections on human existence.

The ten-minute video “Getting Nowhere” documents a conversation with an early form of artificial intelligence, the chat robot ELIZA, which was developed in the 1960s at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum. The dialogue is from 1981, a time when the Cold War and the arms race between East and West were still a real threat to the world community.

The interviewer asks the computer about the probability of a nuclear attack and its consequences for both humans and computers, but instead of answering the questions clearly, they are simply rephrased and returned to the questioner. The chatbot thus acts as a psychotherapist, getting the sender of the worried and doubtful inquiries to find the answers themselves. This call for self-analysis, which illustrates that man-made problems can only be solved by humanity itself, ends in nothingness.

Hahn’s “Getting Nowhere” appears as an extremely current work of art, even though it is over 40 years old. In 2023, when both the threat of the use of nuclear weapons and the potential of the universal problem solver “artificial intelligence” were discussed in the daily press, the artist asked the program ChatGPT to comment on the historical dialogue and give its own suggestion of what it would have answered. It turned out that the dialogue with newer versions of artificial intelligence also led nowhere.

Alexander Hahn was educated at the Hochschule der Künste in Zurich in the 1970s. His artistic studies of man’s relationship to science, history and the power of imagination in a constantly changing and increasingly technological world have resulted in a number of award-winning installations and videos. Hahn’s art has been shown at countless international exhibition venues and works by Hahn can be found in many renowned art museums, including the Centre Pompidou Paris, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and the International Center of Photography in New York. Alexander Hahn lives and works in Zurich and New York.