'The optimized human': Human and machine from the industrial to digital age

Fused with numerous cables, pipes and backgrounded by smoking chimney stacks, this Elisabeth Voigt painting from 1948 appears as an early variant of a cyborg, with humans having been transformed into a servile machine. The master student of Käthe Kollwitz was obviously critical of industrialization, and of war, with Voigt also depicting the horror of the Berlin bunkers in the 1940s.

Wolfram Ebersbach's 1975 painting focuses on tired men returning home from work after a long day working in a mine. The broken, barren landscape shows clear traces of the open-cast mine in which they work, more than a century after such mines came into operation. The work originated in the former GDR, where there is still no sign of the impending closure of the same mines.

Norbert Wagenbrett's portrait "Brigade I" from 1989 reflects the transition from analog to digital society. Here, one of the first industrial computers dominates the group portrait arranged for the staff. The faces look sullen, as if they have realized that they have become subservient to the machine before them.

Jannine Koch, born in 1981, repeatedly focuses on social and political transformations in her paintings, including globalization and the increasing digitization and surveillance of individuals. Military disputes are the focus of this image from 2014 that asks about human responsibility in the use of artificial intelligence to hit targets for so-called preventative war.

Reminiscent of a "Terminator" film, Jana Mertens' aluminum sculpture shows a hybrid of man and machine, an intelligent cyborg of sorts that has been developed by humans to go to war. In an ethical sense, this has little to do with optimizing people via technology. Much of Mertens' work explores the destruction wrought by industrial war.

"You can cooperate well with algorithms and machines in general," says Canadian artist Marie-Eve Levasseur. In her installations, the human body and technology move ever closer together until they finally merge — as in this tooth-like construct.

Together with the artist Martin Kretschmar, Ines Bruhn, a professor of design, has created human skulls with a barcodes using a 3D printer. The 12-part work confronts the viewer with 12 skulls on which barcodes are raised in relief, the mark of humans who can be scanned as part of a consumer culture that focuses on maximizing profits and the associated permanent growth.

The artist Rainer Jacob has placed a series of "radiators" made of ice in a wide variety of locations. This version stands next to a homeless man who is sleeping on the street near the Louvre museum in Paris. "Above," the name of the work, is perhaps an ironic reference to the downtrodden people who have been let go by the modern world of work.