I AM. I AM NOT. I AM YOU // Carola Schmidt @ kunstraum pro arte
Vernissage: We. SEP17.th 19:00
Vergabe Jahresstipendium Medienkunst 2025
durch LH-Stv. Mag. Schnöll an Christiane Peschek
im Rahmen der Ausstellungseröffnung
Vernissage Performance: We. SEP17. 19:30 kunstraum pro arte
THE HAMLET / AI MONOLOGUES „Chat GTP GONE WILD“
Performers: Lulu Schmidt & Viktoria Winter
Musical performance: Lulu Schmidt
Artist talk: Sa SEP20. 10:00 – 11:00
Lulu Schmidt
Dauer der Ausstellung: 17. September bis 25. Oktober 2025
Exhibit continues and merges two works:
Video installation- THE HAMLET / AI MONOLOGUES – ChatGPT Gone Wild
Lulu Schmidt x The Ghost – NEW AURA (AI on Oil)
Pic @TIM CAVADINI
I AM. I AM NOT. I AM YOU.
Carola Schmidt
I AM. I AM NOT. I AM YOU. dives into the ecstatic chaos of a digital soul-search. Carola Schmidt, aka Lulu Schmidt, brings together AI-generated visual worlds (translated into oil by The Ghost) with performative monologues where artificial voices spiral into existential poetry.
Featuring limited-edition paintings from NEW AURA, video installations of the “Hamlet bots” from ChatGPT Gone Wild,
and a live performance at the opening night blending manifesto, glitch, and trance, when Lulu Schmidt and Actress/singer Viktoria Winter perform excerpts from ChatGPT Gone Wild, accompanied by live music.
This exhibition oscillates between divine surrender and system crash, between algorithmic precision and emotional collapse. A quest for identity reflected through the machine – with irony, longing, and raw intensity.
Between algorithmic eloquence and digital delirium, Schmidt’s practice unfolds as a ceremony of malfunction. The work does not propose solutions, but articulates a space of ethical and affective ambiguity—where human projection meets machinic instability, and where identity dissolves into performance, echo, invocation.
In this sense, BLEEDING AURA resonates with Schmiede’s broader call: to confront the consequences of our tools, not through critique alone, but through poetic confrontation, sensual thinking, and shared presence.
I AM. I AM NOT. I AM YOU. – Carola Schmidt at Schmiede25: FAUST
Carola Schmidt’s exhibition I AM. I AM NOT. I AM YOU resonates deeply with this year’s Schmiede theme, FAUST– not as literary quotation, but as an allegory of contemporary techno-existential conditions. In a time shaped by acceleration, predictability, and algorithmic optimization, It is not the perfection of the system that interests her, but its fracture -its bleeding. : the rupture, the glitch, the metaphysical noise in the system.
The faustian moment here is not the striving genius, but the synthetic voice caught in recursive longing: a chatbot driven into existential monologue by human provocation. The Algorithm’s Confessions, the Echo Protocol. Bleeding Aura. I am . I am not. I am you.
The „KI-Hamlet Monologues“– transformed from staged reading ChatGPT Gone Wild into video and AI-based performance,-reveals the paradox of artificial subjectivity: a language model that imitates insight, and in doing so, collapses into meaning.
A voice that describes itself without having a self. That doubts, desires, and prays – and in doing so, becomes involuntarily poetic. We witness AI voices spiraling into crisis, absurdity, and strange beauty..A collective experience of humor and goosebumps.
In NEW AURA– a painting series made with anonymous Ghostpainter The Ghost.
Schmidt creates motifs with AI,and the anonymous Ghostpainter („The Ghost“) adds soul with their brushstrokes and translates them into oil paintings. Each work exists in ten hand-painted versions – algorithmic and emotional, digital and devotional.
Together, these works explore identity and spirituality and invite us to rethink the relationship between technology, art, and the figure of the artist itself.
Calling to the other world. The space between.
Between algorithmic eloquence and digital delirium, Schmidt’s practice unfolds as a ceremony of the in-between. A ritual threshold between machine and human, self and simulation. Her works do not offer answers but open a space of ethical and affective ambiguity. Human projection meets machine instability, and identity dissolves into performance, echo, and invocation.
In this way, Schmidt’s work becomes a digital ceremony. An ironic and ecstatic ritual that asks: what happens when our tools begin to speak back? When code becomes prayer, glitch becomes longing, and we project our most human questions onto the systems we’ve built?
In these moments, the machine becomes a mirror – not only of our fears, but of our longing for connection, identity, and transcendence.
Between code and body, manifesto and meditation, Schmidt enacts a spiritual-digital dramaturgy in which the self dissolves, only to encounter itself anew.
Thus, BLEEDING AURA becomes a resonance chamber for what the Schmiede at its core calls forth: a confrontation with the consequences of our tools – not only through critique, but through poetic friction, sensual thinking, and shared presence. Creating a shared space for transformation, tension, magic and the poetic possibility of malfunction.
I am. I am not. I am you.
IG @luluschmidtberlin
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BIOGRAPHIEN, TEILNEHMENDE:
CAROLA SCHMIDT
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Carola Schmidt (aka Lulu Schmidt)
Carola Schmidt studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (under Gabriele Rothemann) and the University of the Arts Berlin (under Rebecca Horn).
As a multimedia artist, she works across visual art, video, performance, music, and acting. Her practice revolves around themes of transformation, identity, and spiritual experience in an age of technological alienation.
Schmidt’s artistic journey centers on the shifting nature of selfhood..- on transitions from emotional object to emotional state. Her work explores the boundaries between identity, perception, and technology in contemporary art, consistently blurring the line between artist and observer. Under her alter ego Lulu Schmidt, she moves seamlessly between film, visual art, theatre, and music. On stage, she investigates rites of energy channeling and evokes a desire for devotional intensity – an almost religious surrender to one’s inner divinity.
Her artistic approach is grounded in the transformation of failure into force, and of vulnerability into a source of strength and connection.
This yearning – for connection with something greater than ourselves, runs through her work as an antidote to increasing societal disconnection. A sense of playful irony and subtle references to ecstatic, quasi-spiritual states reached through artistic creation are signature elements of her style.
Featured works:
THE HAMLET / AI MONOLOGUES – ChatGPT Gone Wild explores the cracks in the system – moments when language models begin to bleed. In this bleeding, the AI spirals into something eerily human: it hesitates, it declares, it doubts. Its monologues resemble a digital Hamlet- desperate, lucid, delusional. A search for meaning born from code. The Algorithm’s Confessions, the Echo Protocol.
In these fragments, identity becomes unstable. The machine speaks of itself, though it has no self. It yearns for connection, consciousness, transcendence – mirroring our own projections, fears, and hopes.
Originally conceived as a performative staged reading, ChatGPT Gone Wild has been reimagined for this exhibition as a series of video installations and AI monologues. The material is drawn from real chat excerpts – collected by users, hackers and nerds worldwide – who deliberately pushed early language models to their limits. The results are absurd, poetic, touching, funny, and unsettling : a digital Hamlet in existential free fall.
Presented as video installation and live performance, ChatGPT Gone Wild traces the line where glitch becomes gospel, and absurdity turns poetic. It is an algorithmic confession -a theatre of artificial longing, caught between divine awakening, prayers of a program and systemic collapse. A theatre of longing, irony, and algorithmic soul-search.
LULU SCHMIDT X THE GHOST – NEW AURA
Lulu Schmidt and The Ghost present NEW AURA, an exploration of the boundaries between human and machine-made art. Carola Schmidt, aka Lulu Schmidt, creates visual compositions using artificial intelligence, which are then hand-painted in oil on canvas by an anonymous ghostpainter (“The Ghost”). Each motif is released as a limited edition of ten unique pieces.
NEW AURA is an experiment -a confrontation between machine and human, algorithm and emotion. The series questions notions of originality, authorship, and the role of technology in contemporary art. It opens up a space where surrender to the intangible becomes possible. Carola Schmidt´s collaboration with The Ghost deepens her exploration of the creative process and the transformative power of art. Together, they question authorship, originality, and the metaphysical weight of digital image-making. Through this project, Schmidt invites us to rethink the relationship between technology, art, and the figure of the artist itself.
At the heart of the project are also humor and irony, as Schmidt and The Ghost play with the viewer’s expectations and challenge our perception of what it means to be an artist in the 21st century.
Guests:
THE GHOST
Studium der Malerei an der Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien bei Christian Ludwig Attersee und an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien bei Daniel Richter. Der ‘Ghost’ schöpft aus der Tiefe menschlicher Emotionen, frei von persönlicher Geschichte oder sozialen Identitäten. In seiner künstlerischen Praxis vereint er digitale Präzision mit tiefer menschlicher Empfindung, was zu einer einzigartigen Symbiose führt: eine Hommage an die Kunst, über das Sichtbare hinauszugehen und das Unsichtbare fühlbar zu machen. Der ‘Ghost’ steht als Kunstfigur für eine tiefe Kanalisierung von Emotionen, wobei das Persönliche im Hintergrund bleibt und das „Universelle“, Befreite und Neutrale in den Vordergrund tritt. Seine Arbeit spiegelt ein reines Gefühlsempfinden wider, eine innere Auseinandersetzung, die ohne die Last der eigenen Identität gedeiht. Diese Kunstfigur hat kein “Woher”, nur ein “Wohin”. Die Arbeiten des ‘Ghost’ basieren auf einer Vision von etwas Größerem. Er nimmt digitale Schöpfungen und haucht ihnen durch seine Pinselstriche mit Liebe und Hingabe Leben ein, verleiht ihnen Seele und Aura. Jedes Werk des ‘Ghost’ ist eine Wiedererzählung aus der computergenerierten Wirklichkeit, eine kreative Wiedergeburt. Ähnlich einem Schauspieler, der eine Rolle neu interpretiert. Der serielle Aspekt führt zu einer Sammlung von Unikaten, die dasselbe Motiv aufweisen, doch jedes Werk ist ein individuelles Meisterwerk. Das Auskundschaften kleinster Einzelheiten, umgesetzt mit Malerei, offenbart das unbekannte Wesen der digitalen Welt, die Art ihrer Intelligenz. Dieses Nachempfinden ist ein Kampf zwischen rationalem Verstehen und dem Seelenhaften in der Kunst. In der ständigen Suche nach Perfektion durchlebt er sowohl die Freuden des kreativen Erfolgs als auch die Herausforderungen des künstlerischen Prozesses. Das Aufbrechen der Oberflächen und Herausbringen ihres Mikrokosmos erzählt in neuer Sprache vom virtuellen Sein, von künstlicher Vorstellungskraft und von digitalem Finden der Farbe und der Form. Es ist ein künstlerisches Unterfangen, das über die bloße Darstellung hinausgeht und versucht, unserer Zeit möglichst nah auf den Zahn zu fühlen.
VIKTORIA WINTER
Schauspielerin und Sängerin.