by Lars Holdgate, studio photos by Mackenzie Walker // Sept. 23, 2025
I visited kennedy+swan in their studio on a drizzly August day. At the time, the artists were in the middle of envisioning new environments: having only moved into this space at the end of May and having been on a residency during the summer, they were still unpacking. At the same time, they were in the all-consuming process of creating a new digital world: ‘The Red Queen Effect’—kennedy+swan’s exhibition that opened at Schering Stiftung during Berlin Art Week.
The title of the project was taken from a scene in Lewis Caroll’s ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’ where the Red Queen explains to Alice that she must run as fast as she can in order not to fall behind. Evolutionary biology adopted this image to describe the race between species and the environment: in order to survive, biological systems have to change–constantly. The pressure associated with development is mirrored in our social, cultural and economic worlds, too. The idea that we must accelerate in order to remain static is an inversion of the promise that technology was intended to hold. Things were supposed to become easier, differences less polarizing and society more democratic.
It seems strange for a novel that is over 150 years old to bear such relevance to contemporary issues. With this in mind, I sought to approach kennedy+swan’s work through the question: how does a medium shape our hopes and fears associated with the future, if at all? To what extent are they interlinked? Though it may not be the loudest narrative in their work, it is inherent to it. ‘The Red Queen Effect’ shows that, today, digital and analog worlds are inextricable and the analog-digital spectrum is a tightrope that kennedy+swan are constantly running along.
Their Prenzlauer Berg flat isn’t exactly the AI wonderland I had expected. Apart from a dictaphone, a camera and an outcast Macbook, there isn’t really much in terms of what one might call “technology” lying about. As it turns out, there is a discord between visually satisfying digital art and the objects that produce it. Standing somewhere in the studio is what kennedy+swan call “the work horse”: a large, chunky gaming PC with flashing lights that is your only option if you want to create a 3D, 8-channel, 4K immersive world. This mystical being is hidden away in another room. I do not get to see it and am content in my ignorance.
Instead, I spot a bookshelf and naturally it leads our conversation to the topic of books. We delve into a selection of kennedy+swan’s published works that make up an important part of their practice. But these aren’t books in the classical sense. Some are nostalgic, others futuristic and some require the intermediary of a smartphone to be read.
Commissioned by Gropius Bau as part of ‘Ether’s Bloom: A Programme on Artificial Intelligence’ kennedy+swan created ‘Mixed Signals’ in 2023. This was, as they put it, a time when the general attitude towards AI was one of distrust. The artists wanted to provide a contrast to the doomsday narrative dominating public discourse and, as a result, sought to apply AI’s data processing abilities to the natural world, mooring onto the recurring theme in their work: non-human intelligence. The project would develop into a study of animal and plant sounds, making visible what is otherwise obscured and facilitating human engagement with a seemingly inaccessible world.
‘Mixed Signals’ was initially a series of augmented watercolors on paper and wood that would come to life when scanned by the app that accompanied the works. In turn, this concept was transformed into a book: an object that raises textures. The book is a door through which you enter into a world while, at the same time, something else enters into yours. kennedy+swan’s aim was to create new and better ways of understanding animals and plants. And just as I begin to grasp the layers to this digitized book, I learn that this world is itself a feigned reality: all of the imagery that exists in the app is based on a model that had been crafted by hand, digitized and then made interactive with the help of a computer. A similar creation process is at play in ‘The Red Queen Effect.’
In the center of the room stands a large, white, intricate and quietly imposing model of a building that has the grandeur of a small island. This is ‘ALICE,’ a futuristic-health-biotech-AI-laboratory. It is the center of the universe that kennedy+swan have created for the show, and are thinking about, in and through. ‘ALICE’ promises longevity and eternal life through Artificial Intelligence. Fictional personas, created by the artists and designed to represent a subsection of the population and the beliefs contained within it, are here as part of the initial trials. None of the characters know if the experiment will work. Their concerns and perspectives are diverse, ranging from enthusiastic trans-humanist to data sceptic. It is difficult to respond to any of these fears, hopes and questions but kennedy+swan offer an insight into the complex fabric of our future and by extension, our present. It is less of a speculative imaginary than a well-researched prediction of the thoughts one might have in a world like this.
While it would have been possible to depict images of “real people,” the artists decided to anonymize the views they present by creating avatars that are easier to associate and empathize with, by virtue of the fact that they do not look like “real people.” Viewers will approach this world through different characters, each one having been hand-painted in watercolor. The medical center, the set for this reality, has been built in fantastically minute detail. In a way, it resembles a dollhouse. It is vast and delicate at the same time. For kennedy+swan, miniature models are about having fun, especially considering that, in their own words, “people are losing their love of playfulness.” Discovery not only presupposes openness, naivety, fun and surprise but also a willingness to experience these sensations in the first place. With their work, the duo want to inject these feelings into an art world that is often dominated by seriousness.
However, seriousness does exist in the thought and dedication that the artists put into their work. Everything that can be seen in the kennedy+swan universe has been made by hand. Every pixel has been hand drawn or moulded or crafted. We do not see a virtual world, we see wood, paint and plasticine. The artistic process is a human-digital-sandwich. You start with something created by hand, which is then converted into a digital sphere in which, in turn, a human can live. kennedy+swan describe this as a multi-media collage. Their sensibility to different media and ways of working stems from their respective backgrounds.
Bianca Kennedy has worked extensively with stop-motion, learning to create worlds and stories, frame by frame. Swan Collective (Felix Kraus) has a multifaceted repertoire that includes everything from painting to writing to digital and, in particular, 3D work. The results of these endeavors were deemed to be “too clean.” Together they discovered a new kind of visual language that allows them to bring the “real world” into the computer. For both artists, this was the missing link.
Our conversation about their virtual worlds, however, wasn’t centered on how they created these buildings—the practicalities of painting figures with watercolors, gluing together the pieces, filming the set or even rendering the files. This work, which might appear to be the bulk of it, takes up only about 10% of the time in their artistic process. The main focus is placed on researching, reading and conversing.
I ask whether they see themselves as artists or researchers. The line is difficult to draw, especially as kennedy+swan have spent the last six months working with PhD-students at the TU’s BIFOLD Institute, the AI center that commissioned their recent ‘Lung Portraits’ series, which also appears in the show. Working with scientists and academics has become a recurring component of the duo’s work.
The ‘Lung Portraits’ might be seen as a real life application of the systems presented in the virtual world. Using paints and inks with different weights and washes as well as alcohol and salt, kennedy+swan forge images on square glass plates that will be housed in backlit aluminum boxes, reminiscent of x-rays hanging in doctors’ offices. It takes a few days for the pigments to develop into structures, as different colors bleed into one another, creating webs of meaning. The resulting images mimic tissue collected during lung biopsies, biological barcodes that are then fed into an AI specialized in diagnosing cancers. In identifying these works of art as “real” pieces of human tissue, false positives often occur, proving the AI wrong. With this project, the artists expose the fact that humanity is relatively far away from the almighty AI that has been the cause of much societal anxiety. The artwork is a test of boundaries. Because the AI has only been trained with certain biases, and to look for particular patterns, it is neither capable of discovering new things, nor is it capable of recognizing a thing as something that it is not–a fact that today makes it seem human.
The problem is the AI’s hubris: the “I don’t know” factor is not considered as a response. Having only ever worked with “correct data,” the machine learning scientists were surprised by the results. The data fed into the AI is not just the image “au natural.” Preparation is a laborious process because the data has to be prepared in a particular way, in order for the system to work. At the same time, it is unknown how the data was collected, what kind of people it considers or where those people come from. How are we to understand the results and its distinctions if we do not know what we are feeding it in the first place? The process is flawed.
In this confusing realm of separating real from non-real, it is almost as if kennedy+swan have created a new knowledge system: their forged data consistently leads to repeat diagnoses. Green and blue pigments are almost always read as benign, whereas red and purple tend to indicate cancer and white pixels are often recognized as ovarian cancer.
Watching kennedy+swan create these works is fascinating. Together, they work quickly, silently acknowledging their counterpart’s actions but never infringing. There is an inaudible chemistry that directs the action of four hands and two minds, before the conductor-like movements reach a crescendo that relaxes into a natural ending. The surgeons have completed their operation.
The actual installation of their show has been planned using a small unassuming model of the Schering Stiftung. When we met, kennedy+swan did not fully know yet what their work would look or feel like in the space. Even then, it was clear that each viewer would have the power to see something that the next did not.
The public may or may not be aware of the fact that the futures and realities that kennedy+swan present are, at the same time, being created by scientists in the real world. The invitation to engage with these questions is an opportunity to participate. The artists chose to work in this area because of its universal appeal. When it comes to AI’s uses, people are generally accepting of using it for health reasons. A lot of money is going into these technologies with significant impacts on the environment, too. But what are we supposed to think about it? What does it mean when a doctor uses AI in their work? How was the AI trained? Does it have a bias? Are there different AIs that perform the same task? Is the AI being used a cheap or more expensive model?
‘The Red Queen Effect’ aims to present different histories–whether medical, cultural or social–as part of this virtual reality, allowing us to access speculative futures and scientific environments that are being created largely without our knowledge or active engagement, even as we play a part in shaping them. The virtual world develops by uncovering flaws and damage and then trying not simply to fix it, but to expose AI’s engrained biases and data-driven diagnoses to much-needed questioning. In their studio and beyond, kennedy+swan are using their art practice as a means to slow us down and empower us to critically reflect on the accelerated nature of this algorithmically-obsessed moment.
Artist Info
Schering Stiftung
kennedy+swan: ‘The Red Queen Effect’
Exhibition: Sept. 11–Dec. 12, 2025
scheringstiftung.de
Unter den Linden 32–34, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
