The Prompt Battle Team (Florian A. Schmidt, Sebastian Schmieg, and HTW Dresden students: Bernadette Geiger, Ella Zickerick, Emily Krause, Lina Schwarzenberg, Robert Hellwig, Levi Stein) hosted an online version of their Prompt Battle format: Prompt Battles are a live events – usually held IRL – where people compete against each other using text-to-image software. Participants show off their prompt skills while the audience decides who has elicited the most surprising, disturbing or beautiful images from the latent space of DALL·E 2.
Biographies
Sebastian Schmieg investigates the algorithmic circulation of images, texts, and bodies. He creates playful interventions that penetrate the shiny surfaces of our networked society and explore the realities that lie behind them. In particular Schmieg focuses on labor, algorithmic management, and artificial intelligence. He works in a wide range of media including video, website, installation, artist book, custom software, lecture performance, and delivery service. Schmieg’s work has been exhibited internationally at Kunsthalle Zürich, The Photographers’ Gallery London, MdbK Leipzig, HeK Basel, and Chronus Art Center Shanghai. He is a professor of Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences HTW Dresden.
Florian A. Schmidt is a professor for design and media theory at the University of Applied Sciences HTW Dresden. He has a background in visual communication and has been doing research on the economies of platform-based image production in various forms since 2006. Previous works include The Planetary Stacking Order of Multilayered Crowd-AI Systems, in Digital Work in the Planetary Market (MIT Press, 2022); Crowdsourced Production of AI Training Data (HBS, 2019); Digital Labour Markets in the Platform Economy (FES, 2016); Crowd Design: From Tools for Empowerment to Platform Capitalism (Birkhäuser 2015). Schmidt was a speaker at conferences such as the Digital Labor Conference in New York, Reshaping Work in Amsterdam, transmediale and re:publica in Berlin. He has consulted political committees on digital labour and the platform economy at the Deutsche Bundestag in Berlin as well as the EU in Brussels.
