Jonas Lund is a Swedish conceptual artist who creates paintings, sculptures, photography, websites and performances that critically reflect on contemporary networked systems and power structures. His artistic practice involves creating systems and setting up parameters that often require engagement from the viewer. This results in game-like artworks where tasks are executed according to algorithms or a set of rules. Through his works, Lund investigates the latest issues generated by the increasing digitalisation of contemporary society like authorship, participation and authority. At the same time, he questions the mechanisms of the art world, challenging the production process, authoritative power and art market practices.
Lund earned an MA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2013) and a BFA at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery (2019), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2016), Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2016, 2015, 2014), Växjö Konsthall Sweden (2016), Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam (2013), New Museum, New York (2012), and has had work included in numerous group exhibitions including Centre Pompidou, Paris, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Vienna Biennale 2019, Witte De With, Rotterdam, Kindl – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. His work has been written about in Artforum, Frieze, Kunstforum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Metropolis M, Artslant, Rhizome, Huffington Post, Furtherfield, Wired and more.
The Future of Something
2023, 13’41
The Future of Something (2023), a sequel to Lund’s The Future of Nothing (2023), which appeared in the prequel exhibition, takes a deep dive into the human anxieties framing an AI-driven world. Across the morphing vignettes of seven AI-generated human support groups—ranging from couples therapy to robot love tensions, online poker addicts to content creators anonymous—the video deftly navigates familiar fears of machinic displacement of the self through the heightened drama of parody. Here we watch hallucinated influencers in crisis, unable to compete with the indifferent gaze of an artificial intelligence that doesn’t care about authenticity or creativity. As the humans band together to console each other in group survival mode, some individuals manipulate the counseling sessions to hawk their Youtube channels and for-sale tricks to beat the AI system, ultimately trumping the idea of a superior human morality. Seated at the height of humanity’s fears of a technological takeover, The Future of Something suggests that the real threat in the room may not be the machinic other, but something more human after all.