Kunsthalle Wien

Message (1988) is a film animation that Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951, Antwerp) developed from drawings made at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Free University in Brussels. Van Kerckhoven had been using softcore pornographic images of women in her work since the late 1970s and subsequently began to translate some of her drawings into film animations. In 1983 Van Kerckhoven was invited to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Luc Steels, the scientist who founded it and with whom she first collaborated in 1976. Working at the laboratory offered her the opportunity to access computers and build upon her broader practice of merging the erotic with machine fetishism: ‘I’d always been interested in – seduced by – technological solutions. Many new and groundbreaking theories have something sexy about them. I am attracted to these thoughts, words and new worlds […] the moment I came into this laboratory, I was completely thrilled by the idea that the future is happening here. I was not bothered by all these depressing ideas about art where women had no place – I hardly had examples of women I could relate to in recent art history. When I was in the laboratory, there were women as well as men working – they didn’t make a difference between intellectual human beings, whether they were male or female.’