Exhibition Form Follows Friendship

STONE – PAPER – AI

Conceived as an open and accessible public format, the workshop invites passing pedestrians to spontaneously participate in a collective publishing process. Participants are encouraged to enter memories, fragments of daily routines, personal observations, or small personal news into a digital web-based interface.

On 20 May, the public workshop intervention will take place along the Main riverside in Frankfurt am Main, directly opposite the WDC Hub at the Museum Angewandte Kunst.

From these inputs, AI-assisted micro-stories are generated and instantly printed on receipt paper using a thermal printer. By rapidly producing multiple variations, participants are able to compare, tweak, discuss, and curate different versions of their narratives together. In a second step, participants create their own individual stone stamp and use ink to manually intervene in the printed receipts. Through stamping and analogue marking, the mechanically generated text is transformed into a personal conversation piece carrying an intentionally visible human trace. The process highlights the contrast between automated and collective authorship, while the thermally printed AI-generated text will gradually fade over time, the analogue intervention remains as a lasting mark of human interpretation, memory, and agency. The resulting printed "Traktate" can either be taken home by participants or contributed to the growing collective archive that will later become part of the exhibition at the Museum Angewandte Kunst.