Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss

Mind Circuits is a generative AI installation at the intersection of digital humanities, media theory and artificial intelligence. It draws on Home of the Brain (1990), Fleischmann and Strauss’s pioneering virtual reality work, and reimagines 20th-century media philosophy as a live, interactive dialogue. Instead of preserving these ideas in an archive, the work brings them to life through AI agents inspired by the philosophers Vilém Flusser, Joseph Weizenbaum and Paul Virilio, with artist and curator Peter Weibel acting as a critical commentator. The agents do not simply imitate personalities; each embodies a distinct way of questioning and reasoning. They converse with one another about technology, power, authorship and responsibility, and visitors can join in by voice or keyboard. Although built on large language models, the agents are not meant to be authoritative: AI becomes an interpretive and performative medium, a tool for critical rethinking rather than a substitute for it. The result, in the artists’ words, is ‘an ongoing AI-mediated dialogue with media philosophy,’ ‘continuously shaped, challenged, and transformed by its visitors.’ The work was developed with a team from Chalmers University and Scionova AB, with music by Jacob Dahl.