There is a persistent problem with technologically ambitious art: the institutions equipped to show it are the ones least equipped to attract an audience that isn’t already there. A museum’s new media gallery is a room most visitors walk through on the way to something else.
LAS Art Foundation — Berlin, founded 2016 by Bettina Kames and Jan Fischer, originally Light Art Space — has taken a different route, and designboom’s profile published 29 September puts the reasoning on the record.
The venues are the strategy
LAS stages work in Halle am Berghain and Kraftwerk — a hall attached to the world’s most mythologised nightclub, and a decommissioned power station — plus spaces in Venice.
CEO Kames, quoted in the piece: “It’s easier to come to Berghain… if you’re not part of the art scene.”
That sentence is doing a lot of work, and it is worth taking seriously rather than as branding.
A nightclub’s audience already knows how to be in a dark room with loud sound and no clear instruction. The behaviours an immersive installation requires — stay a while, let it work on you, don’t look for a wall label, tolerate not immediately understanding — are precisely club literacies. Gallery literacy, by contrast, trains you to read a work: approach, decode, move on. Which is the wrong mode for time-based, enveloping work that needs twenty minutes to do anything.
Industrial architecture solves the technical problem for free. A power station has the ceiling height, the floor loading, the power distribution and the acoustic scale that immersive work needs and that almost no gallery has. Museums retrofitting for this spend fortunes on infrastructure that Kraftwerk simply has.
And the threshold is lower in the way that actually matters. Not ticket price — the cultural cost of walking in. The demographic overlap between people who will queue for a club and people who will enter a contemporary art institution is smaller than the art world likes to believe, and the asymmetry runs mostly one way.
The commissions
The list is a reasonable index of the last decade of the field:
- Refik Anadol, Latent Being (2019) — data-driven projection at architectural scale
- Ian Cheng, Life After BOB (2022) — the Emissaries lineage of self-running, AI-driven narrative
- Laure Prouvost, WE FELT A STAR DYING (2025)
- Natasha Tontey, The Phantom Combatants (Venice)
- Plus Jakob Kudsk Steensen — whose Berl-Berl turned Berlin’s prehistoric swamp into a Halle am Berghain installation — and Josèfa Ntjam
What distinguishes this from a straightforward new-media programme is that LAS commissions research, not just exhibitions. Which brings us to the most technically interesting claim in the piece.
They built a quantum AI diffusion model
For Prouvost’s 2025 exhibition, LAS collaborated with Google AI Quantum and developed, in their words, “our own quantum AI diffusion model for moving image” that did not previously exist.
Treat the phrase carefully, because “quantum AI diffusion model” is doing several things at once and the press-release version of it is not a claim anyone should repeat unexamined. What is plausible and interesting, and what a serious collaboration with a quantum computing group would actually produce, is some version of: quantum hardware or quantum-simulated processes supplying structure to a generative model — sampling, noise, or state evolution derived from a quantum system rather than a pseudorandom generator.
That is a genuinely interesting thing to do artistically, and it is worth separating from a claim of quantum advantage. Nobody is generating video faster on a quantum computer. But the character of the randomness a generative model draws on is an aesthetic choice, and sourcing it from a physical quantum process rather than a deterministic PRNG is a real, material, arguable difference — the digital-art equivalent of the argument about analogue noise.
What makes it notable as an institutional act is that an art foundation funded original technical research to make a work possible. That is normally the province of a corporate lab or a university, and the results normally serve a product. Commissioning it for an artwork inverts the usual direction of that relationship, in which artists get access to tools built for someone else.
What to take from it
The venue is a curatorial instrument. If you make immersive or time-based work and you are trying to get it into a gallery, it is worth asking whether a gallery is where it works. Clubs, power stations, car parks, churches and swimming pools all offer scale, darkness and an audience already in the right mode.
And the LAS model — a foundation that commissions research rather than selecting finished work — is the more radical part. Most funding structures ask what you will make. Very few pay for the capability that a work requires not to exist yet.
For related reading on the quantum-art question specifically, we have covered Libby Heaney’s work, which is the most rigorous artistic engagement with actual quantum computation currently going.