24-11-2025

Mario Klingemann at Zero 10 Art Basel Miami Beach 2025

Onkaos is pleased to announce Mario Klingemann’s participation in the inaugural Zero 10 digital art sector at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. The interactive installation Appropriate Response by the AI art pioneer will be presented along with a live-minting experience for the first time. Inspired by the power of words, especially in the condensed format of aphorisms or quotes, the piece reflects on meaning, expectation and our relationship with artificial intelligence and technological systems.

Originally conceived in 2020 at a moment that presciently anticipated current debates on generative language models, Appropriate Response is developed using a custom trained GPT-2 model. The work stages a direct encounter with the generative engine through a 120-character split-flap display and a wooden kneeler, transforming spectatorship into a ceremonial act of invocation. Each interaction presents a unique short sentence on the display written by the machine’s neural network and that can never be repeated. No two encounters will ever produce the same line of distilled wisdom.

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Appropriate Response expands through a live mint: each phrase produced during interaction can be collected as a digital asset, translating the ephemeral act of meaning-making into a persistent, ownable record. This extension binds the physical ceremony to an on chain trace, situating the work at the nexus of performative text, machine authorship, and the contemporary economies of inscription.

The work invites audiences to engage with artificial language not as seamless output but as a contested site of agency. Each viewer participates by processing and transforming the text revealed on the display, where meaning is shaped through interpretation rather than instruction. Appropriate Response received an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2020.