In April 2023, Marat Guelman and his partner will open a gallery in downtown Berlin. The gallery will focus on digital art, but primarily on art created by humans with the assistance of artificial intelligence. At Guelman und Unbekannt, we envision our space as a crucial player in the current revolutionary period in art. As the age-old rift between physicists and poets, humanists and technologists
dissolves, we aim to integrate digital art into the broader artistic context. Our gallery strives to serve as a launching pad for new artists, whose innovative creations have the potential to transform the course of art history. Through our programming and curation, we are proud to contribute to this exciting and transformative era in the art world. Only yesterday, rejected digital artists created their own infrastructure in the digital underground. They were rejected not because of the quality of their work, but simply because there was no such concept as an original or a copy. Today, this problem is solved, and with the help of blockchain technologies, we can track the "provenance" of a digital work more accurately than the history of a painting made with oil paint on canvas. Over the past thirty years, the Internet has accumulated a huge number of images with the status of works of art. This quantity often scares art lovers. There are many talented artists and groundbreaking art out there, but there is practically no consensus among professionals that can help us navigate it. On the one hand, it is understandable that the digital environment not only produces art but also criteria by which it should be evaluated, and these criteria are new in some ways and traditional in others. On the other hand, the essentially democratic, hierarchy-rejecting digital community has not yet been able to create a functioning art evaluation mechanism. We, Guelman and Unbekannt, see our mission not only as placing digital art in an artistic context but also as educating a broad audience and professionals on how to appreciate this new art and understand its development. The brief history of digital art (since the mid-90s) is a unique adventure, and we see the art created by artists and artificial intelligence as its pinnacle. This is why our gallery is not just a virtual platform. It has walls, high ceilings, and an exhibition program for the year. We see it as a bridge between the traditional art world and the digital. In its first year, the gallery will introduce the public to various strategies for human-AI interaction. We plan to expand our interests into the realm of generative art and dive deeper into the phenomenon of digital art as a whole. But Guelman and Unbekannt is not just a gallery. Following Joseph Beuys' words that "every person is an artist," we provide a meeting place for humans and AI, where anyone can create their first artwork, come as a layman, and leave as an artist. Herr Unbekannt, an artificial intelligence trained in evaluating digital art, is Mr. Marat Guelman's public partner in this project. Every artist, not just digital artists, can receive their first review here, based on our thirty years of experience in evaluating works of art. We are inspired by the processes taking place in art today, and our ambition is to become an integral part of this new era. But we also want to become an integral part of Berlin. It is essential that it is here, not in Silicon Valley or London with Basel, that the AI gallery is opening. The air in Berlin is filled with interest in the new.
