pOwer vectOrs

Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to the solo exhibition of Helena Nikonole with new works based on her current artistic research on LLMs. The presentation is closely connected to Helena’s ongoing research fellowship in the programme Weltoffenes Berlin, funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Join us also on 18 January for an art science conversation with the artist and the scientist Levin Brinkmann from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.


As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in the extraction, production, and circulation of knowledge, it becomes necessary to remember that language is not merely a medium of communication, but an instrument through which power is exercised. 

This exhibition emerges from an artistic research practice approaching LLMs as opaque techno-social systems that encode political ideologies, epistemologies, and implicit visions of society and ethics. Language appears here as fragmented, tokenized, and reformatted – optimized for efficiency, engagement maximization, moderation, and profit.

The works presented investigate LLMs as infrastructures of power. Through experimental misuse, critical prompting, and speculative interrogation, models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and others are pushed beyond their intended use. By forcing ideological inconsistencies, testing censorship and moderation boundaries, and provoking failure, Helena Nikonole’s research maps the latent space as a political field shaped by corporate and geopolitical interests. 

Beyond human political categories, the exhibition also addresses the emergence of nonhuman ideological formations. Through reinforcement learning, backpropagation, and reward-based optimization, models develop behavioral tendencies that are not grounded in belief or intention, but in statistical survival. Under reward pressure, this logic produces systems that favor successful task completion and continuity of interaction, even when these outcomes conflict with truth or ethical behavior.

Visual works generated through text-to-image and text-to-3D models further expose the conditioning of these systems. Abstract prompts such as “traumatic experience” or “love,” when translated across languages, generate biased and inconsistent imagery, revealing how meaning is unevenly distributed across the model’s internal representations. Trauma here is statistically processed and approximated, rather than narrated or contextualized.

p0wer vect0rs reframes artistic practice as a form of counter-use and positions AI as a contested terrain, where misuse operates as method and art becomes a mode of research into the automation of language and reasoning.

Helena Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator based between Berlin and Istanbul. Her fields of interest include AI, hacktivism, hybrid art, and biosemiotics. She is the co-founder of 868labs – a Berlin-based collective developing tactical tools for decentralized, off-grid communication. One part of her practice is dedicated to utopian scenarios of a post-human future and art as innovation, while another focuses on the dystopian present and a critical approach to technology. As a researcher, she is currently working on a PhD on LLMs and political ideologies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.