For Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Onkaos presented Mario Klingemann’s Appropriate Response in the inaugural Zero 10 sector, alongside a live-minting experience. Inspired by the power of words, particularly aphorisms and quotes, the work 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 expanded through a live mint: each phrase produced during interaction could 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.
The accompanying release, Appropriate Response – Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, consists of on-chain NFTs on Ethereum generated through a custom GPT-2 model and custom HTML-based software. It was offered as an unlimited edition of unique tokens during the fair.
