The Neverending Cure

Exhibition Opening

As part of their artistic residency at BIFOLD, the artist duo kennedy+swan explored the use of AI in medicine - and how much trust we place in a technology that increasingly affects our physical existence.

Cordial invitation to join the exhibition opening on May 28, 2025, 6:00 pm at the UNI_VERSUM, TU Berlin Main Building, Straße des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin

Preliminary Agenda:

06:00pm Welcome, Prof. Dr. Klaus-Robert Müller, BIFOLD Co-Director

06:05pm Introduction:  AI in Medicine - Prof. Dr. Frederik Klauschen

18:20pm Artist Talk: Felix Kraus, Bianca Kennedy (Artists), Dennis Grinwald, Naima Elosegui Borras, Tom Neuhäuser (scientists), Nataša Vukajlović (Moderator)

Reception

The use of AI in medicine comes with big promises: AI is supposed to alleviate illness, reduce suffering, and extend our life span. Besides the immense technological potential, it is, however, important to reflect on social, ethical, and philosophical issues. What happens when sensitive health data are used to train medical AI models? None of the current systems are error-free. They hallucinate and tend to provide plausible diagnoses instead of admitting insecurities.

One such hallucination is at the center of kennedy+swan’s work The Neverending Cure. An AI model specialized in recognizing lung cancer in tissue scans is submitted to both a playful and revealing experiment. Assisted by doctoral researchers from BIFOLD, kennedy+swan exposed the algorithm to watercolors on glass – painted in the aesthetics of microscopic specimen. What looks like fine structures of real lung tissue to the human eye is recognized by the AI application as potentially diseased tissue and diagnosed as such with astonishing confidence. The duo asks: What happens when sensitive health data is used to train medical AI models? Should machines also be trained with "non-medical" content in order to reliably distinguish between health and illness? How far are we from a diagnostic AI that we can trust wholeheartedly?

Opening times

The exhibition at the UNI_VERSUM will be open May 29 - June27, 2025, Mon - Fri 12:00pm - 03:00pm
Free entry

kennedy + swan

kennedy+swan are the current fellows of the “Art of Entanglement” residency program by BIFOLD, supported by the Schering Foundation. In close collaboration with BIFOLD researchers, kennedy+swan have spent the past year exploring the topic of AI in medicine.
An exhibition featuring new and evolved works created during the residency will open on September 10, 2025, at the foundation’s project space in Berlin.