Training Data – Part I: Interactions, Ectoplasms, and Berlin
A post reflecting on my experience with the Objkt labs Residency, Clara in Berlin once again, and other beautiful events from the past few months.
Writing helps me process events and return to the present moment. It is part of taking ownership of one’s time and language.
After my last post about Clara, I chose to share the experiences of the past three months, using my own words to describe moments I was grateful to witness, before turning toward new projects.
Practical Residency
In early October, I was happy to join the first Objkt labs Residency, organized by Anika Meier, alongside artists working across Objkt and the Tezos ecosystem.
Throughout the residency, I had the opportunity to discover and learn from the distinct visual worlds of my fellow participants Martín Bruce, Yuran Yakon, Daniel W., Salawaki, Georg Eckmayr, Sky Goodman, FantasticPlanet, TAN-TAN, zofi au gore, Frederik De Wilde, Shojiro Nakaoka 中岡 将二郎. The connections formed among the artists in this fellowship felt strong and genuine. And from October to November, we met regularly for sessions with artist mentors, exploring themes and subjects I would describe as essential and anchoring.
How can artists build lasting, meaningful relationships with curators, platforms, and galleries that operate primarily online? How does one cultivate a singular artistic voice at a moment when AI is reshaping not only how we create, but how we understand authorship itself? What does it mean to thrive not only creatively, but also financially and collectively, within decentralized art ecosystems?
Our early sessions with Kevin Abosch centered on the relationship one has with their own practice. We discussed questions of value, authenticity and self-honesty across all dimensions of artistic life, including pricing.
With Margaret Murphy, the focus shifted toward language in community building. We explored how to articulate one’s work with clarity, consistency, and context, and how meaning is shaped as much through framing as through form.
Photographer Boris Eldagsen led sessions on photography in relation to AI, opening discussions around truth, transparency, and communication in online spaces. Similarly to the sessions with Kevin Abosch, these conversations foregrounded self-awareness as an ethical and practical foundation.
Between these sessions, speakers joined throughout the residency, including poet and AI researcher Sasha Stiles, Trilitech Head of Arts Aleksandra Art, and Art Basel Head of Editorial Jeni Fulton. Each brought distinct perspectives and lived experience into the shared space.
Throughout the residency, curator and mentor Anika Meier played a central, connective role. Present at every session, she extended each mentor’s contribution by adding context, precision, and practical insight, helping translate ideas into concrete decisions within our own practices. She supported us throughout the process, while offering consistent feedback and encouragement along the way.
I valued the opportunity to meet people whose paths I had long wanted to understand more closely. In a context saturated with information, these sessions created space for distance, reflection, and attention, particularly around mechanisms that often remain implicit.
Over time, my perception began to shift. The dynamics I moved through felt less abstract and less separate. What had once seemed fragmented started to connect, more like a living ecosystem than a fixed structure. This change came less from theory than from practical attention to how things work in the art world, and from a clearer sense of where and how to act.
What made it meaningful was not only the information shared by the mentors, but their presence and the exchanges themselves. The openness, moments of disagreement, and shared attention created a genuinely dialectical space resisting linear thinking and restoring complexity to how artistic practice and labor are understood.
A grounding, materially engaged experience.
Haunted Berliner Café
Given the emphasis on presence throughout the residency, the title Proof of Presence for our first group show felt self-evident.
During early November in Berlin, Art on Tezos held a group show for the Objkt Labs residency, where each artist created a series based on this theme and its own meaning behind that.
On my side, I began thinking about it without a clear starting point, more as a question that kept returning. “Presence”, as I experience it, started to appear as something brief and barely stable. Constantly slipping away, physically, digitally, emotionally. The longer I stayed with the theme, the less it seemed to point toward anything one-dimensional.
I became drawn to the longing for proximity, specifically in the art world. The anticipation, projection, and the tension of wanting to be there, or wanting someone else to have been there, and to connect.
This is how Cloth emerged.
Cloth is an AI film series of five silent micro films, in which pale, ectoplasmic forms slip from open mouths, appearing briefly in crowded art spaces. In each scene, the floating mist connects people to other presences, suggesting the fleeting appearance of someone we might have hoped to meet.
The imagery draws from nineteenth-century spirit photography, where a spiritual presence was staged, fabricated, and nevertheless believed. In that tradition, thin cloth was often used to simulate vapor, carefully arranged to give a visual form (and a proof) of a presence we want to connect with.
I wanted Cloth to echo this gesture and share the art world’s desire for connection and for control of presence. Each image was generated using Midjourney, trained on historical spirit photographs, then animated in unstable, imperfect, quietly trembling sequences.
The group show Proof of Presence was presented in internet café, at Kottbusser Damm 81. The space and the online settings of the exhibition carried a strange sense of connection, as if something was haunting the computers in the room. The exhibition felt informal, slightly out of place, and playful, which made the experience even more engaging. Screens glowed amid everyday activity as people gathered around them, trying to navigate the online works and interact with the exhibition in real time, mixing curiosity, participation, and a sense of nostalgia.
I’m truly grateful for the rarity of this moment.
Clara and the Pool of Data
It’s time for me to speak about Clara again. In late October, I received a message from Anika inviting me to include Clara in the group exhibition The Bigger Your Pool with The Second Guess, presented during the Art on Tezos event at Schlachter 151 Berlin.
The film was shown as part of the exhibition and released simultaneously as part of You Can Hold My Hand, a collection that includes the film alongside outtakes and fragments emerging from the same narrative world.
In a previous post about Clara, I described the work as an imagined space where AI collaborates with human caregivers, performing small acts of attention, simulating empathy, and protecting fragile forms of memory. The images resemble fragments from a medical training archive, where humans and AI briefly share gestures of care rarely afforded in real clinical settings: patience, presence without judgment, and the quiet preservation of dignity.
The title You can hold my hand comes from the sentence spoken by the AI to Clara during the session, a reassuring phrase that points to AI’s ability to simulate comfort and affection.
For this exhibition, Anika suggested presenting the film on the small, intimate screen of an iPhone. Given my own profound attachment to small and miniature formats, I immediately agreed.
The film was shown quietly within a recessed part of the wall, like a Greek icon, inviting viewers to come closer and look at its details and story. A story that I was glad to share with many artists and collectors during the event.
Long after an artwork is made, and even an entire substack dedicated to it, I often feel there is still more to say. Months after creating this film, I find myself returning to Clara, even missing her slightly.
Anna Is Still Dreaming Right Now
I want to end this letter with Anna and her journey during the year.
Started a few months ago, Anna’s Dream is a collection that brings together memory-like AI-generated photographs of Anna wandering at home. In each image, a different version of Anna appears, while the house itself subtly shifts. The scenes resemble fragments of a dream, where she drifts between multiple selves, wandering through endless variations of the same space.
Anna’s journey unfolded through a series of unexpected moments. Firstly, I was pleased to see Anna #2 selected for The AI Art Magazine, Issue No. 2, Critical Intelligence, and exhibited at Artverse Paris on September 19.
Shortly after, three works from the series (Anna #9, Anna #10, and Anna #11) were included in Fakewhale’s Art Market Curated Program.
Finally, I was also profoundly touched and honored to have Anna #3 selected for the Photorealistic AI category of the Tezos Photography Prize, alongside Jvde_AI and Danielle King. On the occasion of it’s exhibition at ArtVerse Gallery in November, I released a new photo from Anna’s Dream, Anna #11, which was shown alongside the other selected works.
I was touched to learn that many people connected with these images as if they were memories of their own. This response gave the project a life beyond my own experience. And this journey will continue over the coming months, perhaps years, until the final image brings this dream to an end.
I already feel a sense of nostalgia around the end of the collection, but I also believe it is important to know how to conclude a collection.
I would like to close Part I by thanking everyone who has supported my work over the past year, and by wishing you all a joyful holiday season. Part II will be dedicated to my latest film, Electric Mom, presented in the context of my release Encoding Body with Objkt Labs.
Until then, I wish you beautiful moments with your loved ones as we move through the final days of 2025.
With care,
Marine
Love love love meeting you Marine and getting closer as friends! Can’t wait to see you again.