STRWÜÜ in Conversation with Curator Livia Klein
At (capsules), your window shows images of war in an unexpected form. What are you presenting?
We are presenting four works from our series Two Thousand and Twenty-Five: algorithmically mapped territories printed on silk scarves, representing regions where numerous people lost their lives in violent conflicts in 2025. Using computer vision algorithms that follow the same logic as those deployed in military reconnaissance and intelligence analysis, the work processes satellite imagery of each region alongside open-source infographics, such as troop movements, engagement epicentres and other event data. These heterogeneous sources are iteratively superimposed. In each iteration, the system performs blob detection, draws thin bounding lines, executes morphological operations such as erosion and skeletonisation, and transforms colour values according to predefined mathematical rules.
The technical description sounds cool and precise, yet the subject could hardly be more painful. Do you remember where the series began?
Two Thousand and Twenty-Five began with the loss of a person who was important to us. It made us think more intensely about what loss means, both on an individual level and in a broader context.
The title names a specific year. Why 2025?
Time and place are not actually decisive in themselves. Wars are happening all the time, and no battlefield is more important than another. These are merely excerpts. We are not concerned with any one specific event.
Given such a personal starting point, it is striking how much distance the work keeps. How did you approach working with these tools and this material?
From beginning to end, we tried to exert as little direct influence as possible on the image-making process. In a sense, we wanted to keep the work dry. War easily triggers strong emotions and subjective judgements. We were interested in what might happen when we leave this act of seeing to a system.
What did you see when the system produced its first images?
Algorithms effortlessly turn complex information into beautiful images, without any moral awareness of brutality. That inevitably creates a sense of unease.
That unease seems close to what you call an “inhuman gaze”. What do you mean by that?
“Inhuman” does not simply mean non-human. Human perception is shaped by experience. We know empathy, historical memory and what loss means. Algorithms do not have this kind of experience, and this is where the discrepancy arises. Today, machines can see differently from us, and in certain respects more precisely. But the information they process does not carry the same experiential meaning for them that it does for us. The images are therefore the result of two things at once: a form of seeing that exceeds human perception, and a form of seeing that lacks ethical experience of its own.
If you leave the seeing to a system, where does your authorship lie, and where does it end?
Authorship does not necessarily belong to the person who controls the outcome. It can also belong to the person who designs the system of conditions that produces it. Our authorship begins with the construction of the system, but gradually disappears into it.
And between the two of you, how do ideas take shape?
We go for walks. As we walk, we exchange our observations. Ideas and concepts gradually take shape by being passed back and forth between us.
Even your name withdraws a little from authorship. How did STRWÜÜ come about?
It is simply a random combination of letters, with no meaning and no supposedly correct pronunciation. The name is merely a designation.
Technology and its political dimensions seem central to your work. What draws you to working with code and algorithms?
A central concern in our work is the dynamic relationship between technology and nature. We are less interested in technology itself than in how it changes the way we relate to the world.
Where does nature appear in Two Thousand and Twenty-Five, a work that looks at the earth through satellite images and algorithms?
What is observed here is not the terrain itself, but the events and the wider web of relationships that surrounds them or lies hidden behind them. For us, nature does not have to appear in concrete forms such as plants, animals or landscapes.
The images are printed onto silk scarves made to the exact specifications of luxury brands: mulberry silk, twill weave, hand-rolled hems. Why this particular object?
The silk scarf is an almost perfect medium for speaking about images, capital, identity, power and consumption. What interests us is not the contrast between images of war and a luxury object. Rather, we are interested in how this juxtaposition makes visible that they have always been part of the same mechanism.
How did you arrive at this connection between wealth and destruction?
It comes from looking at flows rather than isolated objects. War is never only a geographical event; it is a node within a complex network of flows. The same technological system can be used to generate wealth or to identify a target for destruction. We are not suggesting that these uses are equivalent, or that wealth is simply the other side of war. But they can emerge from the same infrastructures and modes of calculation, and they often speak the same language: efficiency, prediction, optimisation, risk management. So we ask: if such different domains operate through a similar logic, how, and on what basis, do we draw a boundary between them?
You mentioned the unease of seeing algorithms turn brutality into beautiful images. How do you deal with the risk that the scarves themselves might be perceived as beautiful or decorative?
We cannot, and do not want to, eliminate this risk. We don’t think the question is whether our immediate response to these images is ethically “right”. What matters to us is what happens once we realise what we are actually looking at.
The work also raises the question of responsibility borne by those who design such systems. Who do you see as responsible, and do artists working with the same tools share part of it?
We do not believe that responsibility can be attributed to a single person or actor. Gustave Le Bon, whose reflections remain relevant today, writes in The Crowd: “Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations.” None of us can fully step outside the system of flows we are part of. We all participate in it in different ways, and that makes responsibility a shared question.
Finally, how did you approach showing the work in a storefront window, a space traditionally associated with luxury goods and consumer desire?
A storefront is never a neutral space. It is a machine for producing attention, and that is exactly the function we wanted to work with. The work itself is concerned with looking, desire, consumption, capital and violence, and with the relationships between them.