Val Holfeld
AI AI AI…

As my friend commented, in a tone ladder downwards, when I tried to explain my experience of the exhibition by Ommery De Zutter at KIOSK Ghent on Sept 12th 2026. Here, the written words follow my instincts in the exhibition de Wereldgeest beyond the categories of good and bad. Within that, my own non-understanding of the language, since I can’t read Dutch, they capture the feelings that arose.

I entered the exhibition after a conversation with the curator Simon Delobel, which already shaped my first impression. KIOSK Ghent opened their doors on a Saturday afternoon, and I arrived after my second coffee and sun beneath moist clouds. The exhibition occupies the unusual architectural setting of the former Clinical and Polyclinical Institute, built in 1905 by Louis Cloquet, a prominent Belgian representative of neo-Gothic architecture. The rooms originally functioned as a didactic anatomical auditorium. There is something strangely appropriate about this history: a space once dedicated to making the human body legible now becomes a space in which the attempt to make artificial intelligence legible takes place.

…and yet, the body¹ seems to disappear.

The absence of the engineer-architect Ommery De Zutter at his first solo exhibition, after producing new works within the summer residency at KIOSK Ghent, becomes one of the most striking elements. The artist does not need to be physically present. The work speaks, the curator explains, the AI generates, the archive accumulates. But the more the exhibition insists on processing, understanding and controlling Artificial Intelligence², the more the human presence behind it seems to appear.

I began to wonder whether this disappearance is accidental.

My first encounter with the exhibition became almost comical. I entered one of the three gates, the one on the very end and saw papers lying on a table, next to a large sheet of paper hanging from ceiling, where thousands of small QR Codes draw my attention. Scan me Baby, 2026 allows access to Ommery De Zutter’s personal archive of dystopian landscapes, as I later found out.

“Where did you get that from?”

“From the table there.” As I try to orientate myself.

“No. It is part of the artwork.” while Simon Delobel explains and finds me.

“… a bible, generated with AI only two days before the opening he finished it. More than six hundred pages, printed on A4 paper. I also thought this might happen…”. As I dive through The Bible of the Mastermind Builder, 2026, the object becomes an abstraction of absolute authority: holy, controlling, difficult to understand, and here it is reproduced by Artificial Intelligence. Something in me became uncomfortable: If humans create the Digital Art³, what does it mean when Digital Art begins reproducing the structures through which humans have historically understood knowledge and authority.

Words by Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism cross my mind:

There is no difference between the real and the unreal. (Legacy Russell, 2020) So, Digital Art can’t not function as an outside form. Nor, as an escape.

As I search for more insight, questions within other conversations in the room appeared, that seemed almost as important as the work itself: When do we⁴ use AI? Why do we use it? What does it mean to think with it?

There was an evident fascination with the complexity of the artist’s mind, with the artist’s way of thinking and “nerding” as I hear someone say about the science of the craft. At one point, the language became almost excusing: The artist is transformed into an exceptional figure. An outsider. Someone who’s thinking supposedly exceeds ordinary human categories. The exhibition begins to dress this complexity in something almost cosmic. I began to wonder if this is one of the central traps of Digital Art discourse: the moment in which something made by humans is elevated into something beyond humans.

Gazing through the exhibition and entering the main room, in which upper-hanged framed paintings in different colours between the windows appear. Shiny, glitchy and multi-layered paintings. The hanging reminds of portals, unreachable and almost memorial. One Epistemic Perspective, Post-Architectural Organism, Rear Extension, Semantische geometrie, Onbestaande kleur and de Wereldgeest appear as digitalised painting and an entrance into somewhere else. Aside the portals, the room was filled with uncomfortable emptiness, while in the center of the space staged VR goggles appeared. A cosmic free ticket to the piece Hoe ziet digitale oneindigheid eruit, 2024. Right in front of me, images suggest infinity. A watch becomes a portal to another world⁵. The world is presented as infinite, holy, mysterious, unknowable. VR becomes something to enter rather than something to examine. Perhaps the exhibition is most interesting when read as a form of self-producing religion⁶. Because the exhibition might unintentionally demonstrate, how quickly Digital Art can become reproduction of a religion, that centres itself around power and holiness. When reality becomes unbearable, abstraction offers another world. When human knowledge becomes impossible to contain. The digital world becomes as something simultaneously incomprehensible and controllable.

The glitch disappears. The failure disappears. The ugliness disappears. The labour disappears. The political and material conditions disappear. The diverse belief system disappear.

Suddenly I had a so-called Aha-moment. The exhibition is white. Not only aesthetically⁷. Conceptually. The digitalised painting of a portal could almost be imagined hanging in an office of Elon Musk. The image of the universe, the technological sublime, the desire to transcend the material world. I found myself thinking about how close this is to a repetition and how it points towards white supremacy⁸ in the digital sphere—not because the work necessarily declares such an ideology, but because it can reproduce a worldview in which technology appears universal while the histories of power that produced it disappear. The bible, the archive, the watch, the music, the photographs, the texts, the books, the portals: they begin to construct a mythology around the machine.

Whose knowledge is being reproduced? Whose histories? Whose bodies?

Whose labour? Whose worldview becomes universal?

The works, the language surrounding them, the fascination with intelligence, the technological obsession, the cosmic imagery and the desire to control the machine began to form a particular constellation.

A man and his machine. A man trying to understand. A man trying to control. A man trying to go beyond himself. A man disappearing in abstraction.

From curator to curator.

From men to men.

This is not to say that the exhibition simply is those things.

Though that, Digital Art projects cannot simply be viewed as Digital Art projects. They have to be examined through their implementation and their context, as Christiane Paul in the chapter Artificial Intelligence in the book Digital Art published in 2023 as the 4^th edition explains.

As I find myself in the last room of the exhibition, where the exhibition’s gender politics became impossible for me to ignore. In Alogia (gedichten), 2026 emotional states are translated into texts and displayed on small printed formats on off- white paper beneath my eye site. Letters. Poems. A handful of these letters addressed to women associated names. Though apart from the addressee, they began to feel like suppressed letters to oneself—emotions that could not be directly confronted and therefore appeared through another figure.

I wondered whether these poems of the so called “real emotion” as Ommery De Zutter in the interview paper with Simon Delobel explains, becomes a kind of feminine surface onto which something else is projected. The emotional complexity of the real world is transferred onto paper, onto names, onto female figures, while the technological system producing those emotions is elevated into abstraction.

It makes it so vividly visible- The inability to understand oneself. The inability to control oneself. And therefore, feminine becomes imaginative on paper and relates to real emotional states. The gender binary becomes visible not because the exhibition necessarily announces it, but because of what it repeatedly centres: mastery, complexity, control, technology, infinity and the exceptional male mind. And yet again a reminder, that the Digital World does not exist outside of gender and Digital Art does not exist outside power and there is no such thing as a neutral universe.

As I left, what mainly remained is frustration. But I do not want to hide that emotion behind a supposedly objective critical voice. To be honest, I felt something.

Its directness, its kitsch, its apparent naivety, its refusal to acknowledge certain complexities—it all became so visible that I could no longer remain indifferent.

For me, curatorial work is not only about recognising artistic complexity it is also about creating a frame in which the artwork is displayed. Here, the conversation should not begin from the question on how much we use AI. It is not a question of guilt: How often do you use it? What do you use it for? Those questions already assume that using AI or the digital world is the problem.

I am interested in something else. What alternative ways of thinking with technology are possible? What human thinking strategies do we need to deconstruct before we can imagine alternatives?

The question is not simply how to look beyond oneself. Perhaps, we first need to look directly at ourselves, before what is beyond. And, before we reproduce ourselves in this called beyond. Perhaps, the portals cannot only point elsewhere, cause sometimes we shall learn to stay inside the glitch.

Inside the fragile, the absurd and the ugly. (Legacy Russell, 2020) To disrupt the binary and categories of real and un-real.

In its simplicity the exhibition de Wereldgeest remains confrontational, in which the words here expose it as such.

To take care of all existing reality is the most complex thought that no one has prepared oneself for, as Eva Illouz describes in the book Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, that I again stumbled upon, while listening to the book Radical Tenderness by Şeyda Kurt published in 2021, as I was gathering my thoughts on this review. And, maybe that is where a genuinely complex conversation about Digital Art and the use of Artificial Intelligence begins.

¹ Here, bodies recognize all forms of bodies- mentally, physically and spiritually. (P. B. Preciado)

² Here, Artificial Intelligence is described as a set of technologies that allows computers and machines to mimic human intelligence, learn from data, and solve problems.

³ Here, Digital Art is described as a cultural practice and medium that both exposes and challenges the pervasive logic of technology, surveillance, and capitalistic control in the information age.

⁴ Here the we, refers to the conversation between me, the curator, the space and the bodies present in it.

⁵ Here the definition of world recognizes that it’s embedded in a colonial context. Jack Halberstam

⁶ In the Christian Institutional understanding, being religious moves beyond just following rules or believing in a higher power. It centers fundamentally on a restored relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

⁷ Here the word aesthetic is not about beauty, taste, or static art. Instead, aesthetics becomes a somato-political practice —the intentional, techno-living invention of the body and ways of life that resist the dominant patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist norms. Paul B. Preciado

⁸ Here, white supremacy describes a pervasive system of structural and societal racism that privileges white people across legal, political, and cultural institutions, regardless of individual racial intent.

Readings

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism, 2020

Jack Halberstam, Unworlding: Trans*Architectures, 2024

Christiane Paul, Digital Art, 4^th Edition, 2023

Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, 2004

Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 2008

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985

Şeyda Kurt, Radical Tenderness, 2021

About Val Holfeld

Val Holfeld is a stage & costume designer, curator, writer and founder of the Collective Zirkusgasse (est. 2023) from Vienna. In their practice, they use scenography as a curatorial tool to question spatial norms and to imagine spaces shaped by emotional logic rather than linear narratives. Holfeld describes themself as a stage curator, creating exhibitions that function as performative situations. Atmospheres, shared vulnerability, friction, and moments of chaotic resistance form the core of these spaces, which become sites for collective memory and activist urgencies. Humour, pop culture, and queer aesthetics are central strategies in their work, breaking down curatorial authority into alternative modes of engagement. Humour acts as a political device — disrupting conventions, fostering connection, and resisting solemnity as a standard of exhibition-making. Holfeld’s curatorial perspective is inseparable from their identity and lived experience as a queer, non-binary, trans person. Though shaped by access to middle upper-class, white cultural spaces, their work emerges from the friction of inhabiting these spaces without belonging to their norms. They see embodiment itself as a curatorial method: a way of knowing, resisting, and imagining otherwise. Since 2023, Holfeld has curated exhibitions in Off-Spaces (Ve.Sch, Collective Zirkusgasse) and gallery contexts (Tart, Klaus & Elisabeth Thomann, Parallel), while working mainly across German-speaking countries. Their long-term aspiration is to establish an independent art space for and with faggots, queers, and their fairies.