The AI mayor: When space for culture remains denied

Siegen. The cultural and creative industries in North Rhine-Westphalia are considered the second strongest economic sector in the state. However, despite this impressive performance and its immense potential for innovation and social cohesion, the cultural sector is in a profound structural crisis. 
Frustration among cultural workers is growing rapidly as they are confronted with an increasingly precarious environment: appeals for donations from theaters are piling up in mailboxes, while artists are struggling with stagnating or even declining funding. This imbalance is particularly acute at the local level, where necessary cultural policy support that would be essential for the development and safeguarding of cultural offerings lacks. This creates a paradox between the declared value of culture and the real political priorities, which urgently requires critical reflection and visible intervention.

Amidst this tension of current cultural policy debates, an unusual protagonist enters the stage in the city of Siegen: a mayor, fictional, not elected by any party, but with a clear mission. 

She is the digital image of a political act, generated with the help of artificial intelligence and conceived by renowned photo artist Thomas Kellner (born in Bonn in 1966). Her existence is both a statement and an intervention: she demands structural changes on behalf of the cultural scene, calling for more financial resources and recognition.

The portrait shows a friendly-looking middle-aged woman, generated by a text-based prompt, fed by the aesthetic conventions of the large AI image archives. The mayor was not corrected after generation, but left as she appeared. Kellner only adjusted the image background and individual details to make the figure more realistic.

It is called “AI Mayor” and is part of the current long-term project “Facets of the Big City” by photo artist Thomas Kellner. In this project, Kellner aims to make one percent of the population of the city of Siegen visible in the form of portraits. The people depicted are not named, but identified solely by their professions, such as chimney sweep or, in this case, AI mayor. This deliberate anonymization focuses attention on the social function and professional activities of those portrayed.

Although the AI mayor lacks a personal biography, her dimension as a figure is defined precisely by this absence. She is not a person, but a principle. Her lack of individual history or personal characteristics elevates her from a mere representation to a concept. She symbolizes the political will that is currently lacking and thus becomes a manifestation of a social vacuum rather than just a figure. This strategic absence of a biography gives her an enhanced symbolic presence that allows her to resonate deeply with the frustrations and aspirations of the cultural sector.

Kellner's AI mayor is thus much more than a digital gimmick. She acts as a symbolic representative of an industry whose structural weaknesses have long been chronic. There is a provocation in her programmatic artificiality: if real politicians do not adequately represent culture, must a fictional one do so?

The project addresses the structurally precarious state of the cultural and creative industries. With around 1.8 million employees, accounting for 3.9 percent of the total workforce in Germany, their economic contribution is considerable. Despite this significant economic relevance, the sector remains underfunded, underrepresented, and often insufficiently protected politically in many areas.

The AI mayor succinctly illustrates this gap. Her role is not that of a real elected representative, but rather that of a synthetic symbol. She articulates demands that are real and urgent: the need for easier access to funding for freelance and self-employed cultural workers, the establishment of municipal scholarships and adapted funding structures, a stronger anchoring of culture as a cross section task within urban and state policy areas, and the social recognition of art as a systemically relevant service. This implies an understanding of culture that goes beyond mere leisure activities. Culture is understood as an integral part of a democratic, pluralistic society that creates spaces for critical dialogue, identity formation, reflection, and social encounter—aspects of particular relevance in times of social fragmentation, disinformation, and economic instability.

The physical presence of the AI mayor in urban spaces, for example on posters, creates a tension between digital construction and real public spaces. She visually competes with authentic election posters, elements of administrative aesthetics, and commercial advertising messages. This leads to a blurring of the boundaries between fiction and reality. The AI mayor becomes visually effective in her non-reality and thus transforms herself into an artistic intervention in public space, creating a new form of perception precisely through her artificial presence.

The AI mayor is not a predictive vision of the future, but a reflective image of the present. She addresses the significant loss of political representation for a central social group, the cultural workers, and temporarily gives them a visible face in the form of a digitally generated representative. The project operates in the complex field of art, politics, and technology. It uses algorithmic image generation to draw attention to real injustices, while at the same time making the inner mechanisms of this technology itself transparent. The artificiality of the figure is not a shortcoming, but a conscious and powerful artistic strategy.

Through this artistic intervention, the AI mayor gains a paradoxical credibility: she does not embody a specific person, but she represents an undeniable social truth. 

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