From Hamburg to Madrid, a season of immersive shows and a major Hito Steyerl survey puts an old question back in front of audiences. Three cases from the past decade show how differently the law, the market and the photography world answer it.

This autumn, visitors in Hamburg, Berlin and Madrid can walk into projected paintings, follow Odysseus through a 90-minute immersive journey and, from 30 October, see a major survey of the media artist Hito Steyerl. AI Exhibitions, a European directory of AI art and immersive shows, lists 194 exhibitions in 91 cities, among them 16 in Hamburg, 13 in Berlin and 15 in Madrid. Not every one of them uses AI, but a question runs through many: when a machine takes part in making an image, is the result art, and who is the artist?

Illustration generated with AI. It does not depict a specific exhibition.

Three tests, three answers

Over the past decade three very different institutions have been forced to answer the question, and they have not agreed.

The law asks for a human. Since March 2023 the US Copyright Office has said that a work made with the help of AI can be registered only where a person contributed enough original authorship, and that protection then covers the person’s selection, arrangement or modifications, not the machine-generated material itself. On 18 March 2025 a federal appeals court held that the Copyright Act requires a human author, in a case brought by Stephen Thaler, who had listed an AI system of his own as the sole author of an image. On 2 March 2026 the Supreme Court declined to hear the case (No. 25-449). Declining review is not a ruling on the merits, so the appeals court decision stands.

The market asks what a buyer will pay. On 25 October 2018 Christie’s in New York sold "Portrait of Edmond de Belamy," made by the Paris collective Obvious with a generative adversarial network, for $432,500, more than forty times the high estimate of $10,000. It was widely described as the first AI work sold at a major auction house. Critics soon disputed how autonomous the process had really been, and the collective acknowledged building on code written by the young artist Robbie Barrat.

The photography world asks what category a work belongs to. In 2023 the German artist Boris Eldagsen won the creative open category of the Sony World Photography Awards with "Pseudomnesia: The Electrician," an image made with the generator DALL-E 2, and then declined the prize. "AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award," he said. The organizers replied that he had confirmed before the announcement that the piece was a co-creation using AI, while Eldagsen questioned whether the judges had known. Accounts of what the jury knew still differ.

Seen together, the three cases do not point the same way: the law looks for a person, the auction room paid far above expectations for the novelty, and the photographer insisted on a separate category.

What changes when you step inside

In a gallery the work hangs and the visitor chooses a distance. In an immersive hall or a dome the work surrounds the visitor and runs to a schedule, which makes the question of authorship harder to see and, arguably, more pressing. Not every immersive show uses AI, and the same format can carry very different amounts of it.

Hamburg shows the range. At Port des Lumières, a digital art centre managed by Culturespaces with more than 1,700 square meters of exhibition space over two levels, "Monet: Master of Impressionism" has run since 29 August, and from 6 to 8 November the venue hosts COLO Volume 02, three days of digital art made in Hamburg. At the Deichtorhallen, "Hito Steyerl" opens on 30 October and runs to 29 March 2027: about 15 room installations made between 1999 and 2025, shown in a bright zone and a darkened one. The Hamburg tourism calendar says the works address algorithmic control, capitalism, climate collapse and war.

In Madrid, "La Odisea, el Viaje Inmersivo" opened on 18 September at MAD Madrid Artes Digitales, in Nave 16 of Matadero Madrid. According to city listings the journey lasts about 90 minutes and combines staged recreations, virtual reality, 360-degree projection and a holographic installation, in Spanish and English.

Berlin offers two smaller counterpoints. AuraLabs, a space at the RAW site in Friedrichshain that opened in September 2025 and is dedicated to AI, art and new media, changes its programme; Visit Berlin describes its current show as 14 works that react to visitors’ movement or touch. P61 Gallery in Schöneberg presents "Digital Dimensions," which its listing describes as seven rooms with roughly 300 digital works.

The AI Exhibitions map of Europe on 14 October 2026: 194 exhibitions in 91 cities. Screenshot: AI Exhibitions. Map data: OpenStreetMap contributors.

Five questions to ask at the door

The introduction to what AI art actually is on AI Exhibitions argues that the author is whoever shapes the procedure, because a prompt alone is rarely art. It also lists the signs of a strong programme: live generation, curated datasets with named sources, artists who built or trained their own systems, and explanations that do not mystify the technology. Turned into questions for the ticket desk:

1. Who built or trained the system: the artist, or a software vendor?


2. What was it trained on, and are the sources named?


3. Is anything generated live, or is this a rendered loop?


4. What did the artist select, discard and arrange, and what did the model produce?


5. Is AI used as an effects machine, as a medium whose noise and errors are made visible, or as the subject itself?

None of these questions settles whether the work is art. They settle something more useful for a visitor: what exactly they are looking at. The law, the auction room and the photography prize have each given an answer. This autumn, from Hamburg to Madrid, audiences get to give theirs.