Who is the clever mind behind “AIVA”, the absolutely incredible AI novelty that everyone talks about and wants to have? An avatar with a female voice, unfolding in two dimensions like a pattern, praises their successful multi-million-pound project. Answers are not provided, just another ghastly feedback loop of artificiality.

AIVA is an artist animated by algorithms. But first and foremost, she is the tech vision of male IT commitment to more diversity in the arts. Which is why AIVA prefers the “portrait” format in her paintings. An “art documentary” lets us share her creative process and fulfils every stereotype at hand. With unerring wit, Veneta Androva mirrors actual conditions in her computer animated science fiction.

A person sits at a plain table. Time makes its usual rounds – until there is a hiccup. Moments fall into each other, angles of vision diverge, normality slips. The table becomes an unmanageable combination of constantly changing perspectives. The troubled person is transformed into a distorted temporal body. The world atomises itself in basic shapes and colours.

Everything seems neat at first in Randa Maroufi’s performative reconstruction. Cars form orderly queues; market women tie up their baggage. On the monotonous grey background, the scenes appear schematic, like a blueprint where suddenly everything becomes graphically condensed. Everyday life at the border between the Spanish exclave of Ceuta and Morocco, which is crossed illegally by all kinds of goods.

Mies van der Rohe revolutionized architecture with his radically reduced formal language of clear lines and transparency. Claudia Larcher pieces together his building elements – frames, columns, banisters –, makes them rotate around their vertical axes, multiplies and superimposes them until a dizzying compression is achieved which supplants the enclosed space and thus transparency.

Painting, virtual sculptures, technophile hybrids of reality and illusion – Aaron Jablonski has been creating mobile face filters for social media channels since 2018. Sometimes they form a confusing swarm of echoes around a head, sometimes they come as spiky digital punk. His immaterial masks, hovering between fashion and art, conceal as much as they reveal about their wearers.

Most accidents happen at home. That is where a jazz-loving drawn figure is unexpectedly re-confronted with a text by Bertolt Brecht that brings an appeal to their own political responsibility. Something at least must be done to avoid ending up on the wrong side. A trenchant, tidy contemplation that shows some understanding for human indecision.

A real-life tropical holiday resort becomes a stage where staff and guests play their roles in tableaux vivants. They hide their faces behind carved emoji masks that serve – in the digital world – to express emotions and rate things. The result is a superficial and at the same time subversive semi-reality of linguistic, social and cultural levels of (mis-)communication.

The façade of the Paris cultural restaurant EP7 forms the presentation surface for an animated architectural collage. Staggered exterior views of buildings rotate. The game of deception of lines of sight, angles and geometries has an irritating effect. The spatial depths lure the eye into the supposed interior of the body behind the skin of the façade, which is at the same time the mirror of an urban architecture of restlessness.

A home in the middle of the day, only the electrical appliances are whirring. The camera gaze glides through the rooms and floors which are unfolded and seamlessly joined by the editing. Small oddities proliferate in the bourgeois habitat: an unanswered doorbell, an open freezer emitting light. Normality, perhaps unintentionally, whispers something uncanny.

A woman’s voice shouts and whispers her wishes, depending on how she feels and what she wants. Her cartoonishly reduced and exaggerated body dances compromise out of the world. Straight, zig-zag or in sweeping curves, on we go through the hustle and bustle of life. Anne Isensee formulates an enthusiastic wake-up call for self-determination and lust for life.

During a ramble through the forest we see video colour fringes break through the shadows of the canopy. Rolls of thunder and birdsong spread as a deep red pixel moss carpet. Ambient sounds creep up from the distance to filter the visual world. Hallucinogenic data errors drag like scrapers across a discarded layer of paint. The forest becomes a cathedral for the eyes and ears.

A city crossing: Many things happen, one after the other, at the same time and sometimes inexplicable. Even in animated images reduced almost to symbols there is a lot to discover at this place. A speaker describes what is happening in words for people with visual impairments, but she increasingly questions the meaningfulness and translatability of what she sees.

An infrared dot pattern scans body shapes to supply system information for fascinating volume images. The space casts are virtual sculptures, mouldable, with unstable aggregate states. DJ Dixon’s “Transmoderna” performance is pulverized to the beats of Mëhill’s track “Through Withdrawals”: waves of millions of luminescent coloured microbodies against a black infinity.

Sometimes it really takes only two minutes to see through life. In her minimalist animated film, Anne Isensee comes quickly and straightforwardly to the point. What the direct line sketches out as a concept of life looks alluring, too. It is a good thing that there are one or two kinks after all. Nonchalant, witty and profound – and awarded the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig in 2017.

A colourful luminous river flows through the black void. Geometrical surfaces dance in small repeating loops around wondrous organic plants. The abstract lines, rectangles and semicircles briefly form animated figures. Tina Turner’s classic in the musical interpretation of Miles Davis and the animated visual world of Irina Rubina and Michelle Brand.