Mario Klingemann spent two decades teaching machines to make images. In his 2026 series Weapons of Mass Distraction, he deletes whatever the transformer’s attention layer marks interesting; the model fights to produce sense anyway.

The show

Conflict of Interest opened during Gallery Weekend Berlin in April at SLEEK Art Space — a 14th-floor pop-up curated by Anika Meier with Art on Tezos. Three bodies of work spanning the pre-prompt era to now.

The old work: music videos from before prompts existed (Triggernometry and Die Jugend spaltet das Atom, both 2020), built when he worked directly with models, data and sound. He coupled the imagery to the audio, so it ages, rejuvenates, and sometimes decays completely as the track shifts.

The new work, Weapons of Mass Distraction (2026): transformer layers decide, through math, what matters in a data stream. Klingemann intervenes mid-generation and removes whatever the model marked interesting. The algorithm keeps trying to produce sense from what’s left. Meier’s essay on the show is titled “Attention Is All You Don’t Need.”

Beside it, Landscapes (2026): a wall of private slides he collected because they were, in his words, “the most boring images you can imagine.” His question: does attention sharpen when it gets nothing to chew on?

The on-chain tail

I pulled the collection contract (KT1FWrYhDe4WCBnuJ5h6e7kv6HCJP2v3BZVz) on Sept 18: XTZ|Extacy, his techno anthem built on reading the Tezos ticker as “Extacy,” sits at 91 mints across 76 wallets, the most recent landing Sept 6. Its sibling ARE YOU POST? closed June 13 at its 50-piece cap, 44 holders. The token’s own metadata reads: “According to Anika Meier, we are in the age of the post-artist, but since her article in Spike #87 did not mention my name, I can’t say if I would make the list.” A vibe-coded song and video, minted as a grievance.

The dynamic-NFT experiments go further back: an NFT displaying his live wallet balance; a piece that transforms — and destroys itself — as more collectors arrive, layering their wallets into the artwork, patched repeatedly as the underlying APIs died; a series that documented every newly minted Tezos NFT for weeks, the chain read as a time document.

He also created Botto, the autonomous artist whose weekly output gets ranked by its community. On collecting, he describes early Tezos as a water cycle: “If I liked something or if I made a larger sale, I would often go straight on a collecting spree.” He collects artists “in whom I recognize myself from a few years ago,” and estimates “I probably miss 90 to 95 percent of the good work.”

91 mints, 76 wallets, and the counter moves whenever someone collects.