Helena Nikonole

The Artist & AI Residency at the Center for Humans and Machines brings together contemporary art and scientific exploration, facilitating meaningful exchange and interdisciplinary connections between research and creative practice. Helena Nikonole, an award-winning artist, will take part in this residency from October 2025 to January 2026.

Helena Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator whose work navigates the intersections of artificial intelligence, hacktivism, hybrid art and bio-semiotics. Based between Berlin and Istanbul, her practice oscillates between utopian visions of post-human futures and critical reflections on the dystopian present.

She is currently also an artist-in-residence at the Rillig Lab (Institute of Biology, Freie Universität Berlin). In parallel, she is pursuing a PhD in Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where her research focuses on large language models (LLMs) and political ideologies.

Nikonole’s artistic and research projects have been presented internationally at institutions and festivals including Ars Electronica, ZKM Museum (Karlsruhe), CTM Festival (Berlin), Athens Digital Arts Festival, Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Digital Art Zurich Festival, SHIBUYA QWS (Tokyo), and the Warsaw Biennial, among others. She has delivered lectures, talks, and workshops on Art & Science and AI & Art at venues such as the transmediale festival (Berlin), Paris College of Arts, Art Laboratory Berlin, MUTEK Festival (Montreal and Tokyo), Leiden University, and iMAL (Brussels).

Her work has earned recognition including a special prize from the YouFab Creative Awards (Tokyo, 2019) and second prize in the Web-Art category at the Athens Digital Arts Festival (2021). In 2022, her project Quorum Sensing: Skin Flora Signal System was nominated for the S+T+ARTS Prize of the European Commission and won the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2023 in the Art & Science category. In 2025, she was awarded a one-year fellowship from the Berlin Senate to pursue her artistic research on AI and political ideologies.