One Million by Uli Aigner

Since 2024 Rafal Kosakowski has been developing a comprehensive identity for Uli Aigner’s lifelong art project One Million. Over a period of 300 years, Uli Aigner wants to set tables around the world with a million handmade porcelain dishes and drinking vessels. In the age of digitalization and AI, she places the human body, the individual, at the center of her work in a global, cross-generational, and cross-cultural way. Feeding oneself, but also others, is the responsibility of every single person. Eating together is the foundation for peace. Understanding technology is another foundation for a shared future. The art project One Million is an aesthetic, analog/digital experimental arrangement in space and time. With the help of the oldest craft, pottery, as well as programming and the use of generative artificial intelligence and robotics, Uli Aigner attempts with One Million to test the high complexity of the human body against the possibilities of digital machine intelligence.

“Your pottery is not only fabulously beautiful, it is just incredible to hold in your hands. I only drink out of your cups now. They are so sensuous and true. I cannot thank you enough.”

—Lena Herzog, Los Angeles, USA

“One of the most beautiful and poetic art projects I came across lately, both for the artist and the receiver of art. It makes me very excited that it is manifested in form of applied art. It’s about the process, the consistency achieved through singular moments of repetative work: One Million is a long term plan, a commitment, a projection for the future, manifested in the present and based on the connection with technique from the past.”

—Aroha Pepper, Auckland, New Zealand

“With One Million, I take the world personally. The project to make one million pieces of porcelain tableware with my own hands by the end of my life began in 2014. I engrave each object with a number in the exact order in which it was made, thus identifying the vessels as signed, unique pieces. Each vessel is pictured on the website, and the locations of the respective numbers can be found on the digital world map. One Million is a transnational and transcultural art project. Over the years, a global network has developed that virtually connects the clients and owners of these porcelain vessels. The certainty that a piece of damp earth can be turned into an everyday object that anyone anywhere in the world can use connects my work with the entire history of human development.”

—Uli Aigner