Her “artificial assistant” is what Claudia Larcher calls the AI that digitally analysed her analogue “Baumeister” series of collages and generated this film from them. Creator or servant spirit, the machine makes architectural sketches waft biomorphically and enlivens (i.e. animates) rigid shapes. The Japanese Metabolists who called for the fluid renewal of their buildings, the organic growth, deformation and decay of architecture, would have liked “The Artist in the Machine”.

Set theory, one of the cornerstones of mathematics, serves as a metaphor for “social structures as spatial arrangement”, as the first sequence of the film reveals. The visual playfulness first becomes an exploration of two- and three-dimensionality and then turns out to be a well-founded reflection of social power relations. The search for a supposedly correct “order of things” triggers the compulsive element in many viewers. Who’s (not) afraid of being different?