Caspar Frowein / About
Caspar Frowein is a Berlin-based artist. His practice engages with the dreamlike and the absurd, the political and the paradoxical, the truth-based and the entirely made-up. Working across installation, digital media, and spatial intervention, he explores datasets and informational structures as collective knowledge production. His work unfolds through nonlinear symbolic narratives—dreams, myths, hallucinations—as tools for worlding.
Frowein graduated with a Master’s degree from the University of the Arts Berlin in 2024. Recent exhibitions include 2322 (Berlin, 2025), Vorspiel transmediale × CTM (Berlin, 2024), and the Einstein Center Digital Future at the Goethe-Institut (Berlin, 2024).
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?
Dreaming (of You - 52.494297, 13.330227)
Dreaming (of You - 52.494297, 13.330227).
Dreaming (of You), 2322, Berlin, 2025. Photo: Valentin WeddenLike abandoned props from a scenography or figures of a playset, parts rest huddled together, scattered across the floor and over one another. Among the ambiguous forms — oscillating between the amorphous and the familiar — appear what resembles a jug, a shelf, a table, a camera, a chair, a toilet brush, a brick, a bust, and an arrowhead. As if arrested in a state between solid and unstable, their lines have morphed and mutated: Soft yet rugged, the contours are at once organic and artificial, skeletal and abstract. Still, some evoke a sense of functionality, while others remain foreign, an elusive riddle.
With its series of objects — approximating preserved debris or discarded relics — Dreaming (of You) stages an evolving tableau of cognitive estrangement. Constructed in ABS, a ubiquitous material found in toys, household appliances, and consumer electronics, the objects are rendered useless in pure plastic, cast as shadow-versions of themselves. The monochrome forms echo the fragments of archaeological artefacts transformed over time by hands and natural forces, yet their bluntness and sunken planes hint at a progressed process of erosion: features worn away to a point of obscurity, structures beginning to slump. Carrying sensory memories of utility and touch, the surfaces and shapes suggest an intimacy with the human body, but upon closer inspection, they come across as if in a dream state, alien in their distortion.
Dreaming (of You) is an ongoing installation that changes with each iteration in response to its setting, continuously expanding in new locations. Starting from a collection of digitized physical spaces, the installation interacts with the “collective” knowledge embedded in the environments where it is exhibited and in the training sets of artificial neural networks. Every room has a story. Every dataset, too. Serendipitous connections take place in the processing of data, birthing artifacts, or “hallucinations.” Using this purported nonsensicality, Dreaming (of You) plays with how spaces and their objects are coded, offering glimpses into the sea of data that neural networks navigate as well as ways of recoding in a continuous transference between the physical and the digital.
Text by Caroline Ballegaard
Major and Minor Questions (The Killing Of a CEO
Major and Minor Questions is an evolving multimedia installation that uses fables to explore contemporary social and political realities. Within a modular structure, mechanical animals appear as protagonists in different social, political, or psychological scenarios. Drawing on the conventions of the fable, they are assigned distinct traits to reflect contemporary political conditions: powerlessness, relief through role, and authority.
The first configuration, Major and Minor Questions (The Killing of a CEO), integrates text, sound, and documentary material to construct a fragmented narrative. Excerpts from trial records, unofficial documents, and a manifesto attributed to Luigi Mangione are voiced by figures drawn from fable traditions. By the layering of archival content and symbolic imagery, the work tips the balance between evidence, alternative accounts, and subjective reality.
Untitled/Palimpsests (Major and Minor Questions)
Untitled/Palimpsests explores memory and authority. CNC-engraved onto aluminum plates, traces accumulate—fragments of previous works, remnants of storylines, newly inscribed lines. Plates may be removed, replaced, or revisited. Each becomes a site of ongoing inscription, forming together a dense visual field—part schematic, part narrative.
The Interation Major and Minor Questions engages with Greek fables and their reception in the 19th century. Drawing on these narrative traditions, the work employs engraved prints as visual devices to illustrate ideas of relationships, authority, and social structures. Friendship is portrayed as a fundamental risk of betrayal, weakness as a cause of suicide, and authority as an unquestioned instance. The work functions both as an abstract overview of past moral concepts and as a mirror of contemporary systems of values and norms.
Dreaming (of You - 52.503242, 13.394288)
Like abandoned props from a scenography or figures of a playset, parts rest huddled together, scattered across the floor and over one another. Among the ambiguous forms — oscillating between the amorphous and the familiar — appear what resembles a jug, a shelf, a table, a camera, a chair, a toilet brush, a brick, a bust, and an arrowhead. As if arrested in a state between solid and unstable, their lines have morphed and mutated: Soft yet rugged, the contours are at once organic and artificial, skeletal and abstract. Still, some evoke a sense of functionality, while others remain foreign, an elusive riddle.
With its series of objects — approximating preserved debris or discarded relics — Dreaming (of You) stages an evolving tableau of cognitive estrangement. Constructed in ABS, a ubiquitous material found in toys, household appliances, and consumer electronics, the objects are rendered useless in pure plastic, cast as shadow-versions of themselves. The monochrome forms echo the fragments of archaeological artefacts transformed over time by hands and natural forces, yet their bluntness and sunken planes hint at a progressed process of erosion: features worn away to a point of obscurity, structures beginning to slump. Carrying sensory memories of utility and touch, the surfaces and shapes suggest an intimacy with the human body, but upon closer inspection, they come across as if in a dream state, alien in their distortion.
Dreaming (of You) is an ongoing installation that changes with each iteration in response to its setting, continuously expanding in new locations. Starting from a collection of digitized physical spaces, the installation interacts with the “collective” knowledge embedded in the environments where it is exhibited and in the training sets of artificial neural networks. Every room has a story. Every dataset, too. Serendipitous connections take place in the processing of data, birthing artifacts, or “hallucinations.” Using this purported nonsensicality, Dreaming (of You) plays with how spaces and their objects are coded, offering glimpses into the sea of data that neural networks navigate as well as ways of recoding in a continuous transference between the physical and the digital.
Text by Caroline Ballegaard
With its series of objects — approximating preserved debris or discarded relics — Dreaming (of You) stages an evolving tableau of cognitive estrangement. Constructed in ABS, a ubiquitous material found in toys, household appliances, and consumer electronics, the objects are rendered useless in pure plastic, cast as shadow-versions of themselves. The monochrome forms echo the fragments of archaeological artefacts transformed over time by hands and natural forces, yet their bluntness and sunken planes hint at a progressed process of erosion: features worn away to a point of obscurity, structures beginning to slump. Carrying sensory memories of utility and touch, the surfaces and shapes suggest an intimacy with the human body, but upon closer inspection, they come across as if in a dream state, alien in their distortion.
Dreaming (of You) is an ongoing installation that changes with each iteration in response to its setting, continuously expanding in new locations. Starting from a collection of digitized physical spaces, the installation interacts with the “collective” knowledge embedded in the environments where it is exhibited and in the training sets of artificial neural networks. Every room has a story. Every dataset, too. Serendipitous connections take place in the processing of data, birthing artifacts, or “hallucinations.” Using this purported nonsensicality, Dreaming (of You) plays with how spaces and their objects are coded, offering glimpses into the sea of data that neural networks navigate as well as ways of recoding in a continuous transference between the physical and the digital.
Text by Caroline Ballegaard