Eske Schlüters
Scholarship for artists, arts-based researchers, and curators at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz 2025
Eske Schlüters creates site-specific installations, video and slide installations, photographic series, and writes texts as part of her intermedial and post-conceptual artistic practice. Through contextual shifts and strategies of appropriation, she works with the complication of perspectives in her (filmic) essayistic narratives. In terms of content, her projects deal with micro-histories of philosophical and gender-political issues, film and media history, and scrutinizing the narratives of historiography. A recurring motif is reflecting on images and how they are perceived as well as the question of how they inform societies.
At the core of her artistic practice and research is a media-reflexive examination of moving images and the constantly changing techniques of the production of images. In her most recent works, Eske Schlüters engages with the possibilities and conditions of so-called Artificial Intelligence. Eske Schlüters intends to use her scholarship to research the history of Artificial Intelligence in the VALIE EXPORT Center’s archive and establish historical connections to feminist pioneers of media art such as VALIE EXPORT.
Already in the 1980s and 1990s, VALIE EXPORT was engaging with Artificial Intelligence, and in 1999 she wrote the screenplay The Virtual Body: From the Prosthetic to the Post-biological Body which was never made. In connection with Schlüters’ specific use of analog voices in her video and audio works and her current work with text-to-speech programs, she is also interested in the archive’s collection “The Voice as Medium” and VALIE EXPORT’s analysis of the voice as a medium, an information carrier, and as a political subject.
