About

Tuesday, 10 November 2026, 6 pm
Hörsaal (Lecture Hall), Leonardo Campus 2, 48149 Münster

!Mediengruppe Bitnik is a contemporary artist duo working on and with the internet. Their practice moves between digital and physical spaces, often deliberately embracing a loss of control in order to question established structures and mechanisms.

In their work, !Mediengruppe Bitnik have hacked surveillance cameras, tapped into an opera house and broadcast its performances to the outside world, sent a package containing a camera to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and manipulated a building through a physical glitch. In 2014, they sent the bot Random Darknet Shopper on a three-month shopping trip through the darknets. The bot randomly purchased items including keys, cigarettes, trainers and ecstasy, and had the goods delivered directly to the gallery.

Currently, !Mediengruppe Bitnik are curating the artistic research project School of Cow Comfort, which explores how data-driven technologies operate in the agricultural sector.

The event is part of the public programme Skulptur Projekte Sessions, which accompanies the lead-up to the exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster 2027.

It’s now official: the new foyer of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen will open in spring 2027 – we’re excited! Before the refurbishment gets into full swing, we’re inviting you to a packed programme of events in November in the cleared-out halls. Entitled «House of Change – Pre-Construction-Warm-Up-Galore», a group exhibition brings together numerous companions of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen from recent years. Alongside the exhibition, a wide range of events will gather old and new friends, collaborators and allies of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, offering a glimpse into its future.

The exhibition Boom Crash Candy Crush analyses how everyday technology – from games and interfaces to digital platforms – inserts logics of militarisation and control into our bodies and behaviours. The exhibition will bring together some twenty new and existing works by artists such as Aram Bartholl, Mediengruppe Bitnik, Hito Steyerl, Shona Illingworth, ¥€$Si Perse and Mario Santamaría, among others, to question the devices with which technological capitalism conditions perceptions, gestures and forms of relationship in everyday life

"HowToSabotageWorkBetter_2027.pdf" playfully turns the established rules of our efficiency-driven working world upside down. Ten unusual work instructions – such as "Work slowly" or "Cry on Zoom"— light up the winter sky in red neon lettering in the center of Zurich. Passersby and commuters are invited to take a fresh look at their daily work routines and question them. The ten instructions are not only displayed on the façade of the Josefstrasse energy central, but also appear on the backs of city buses, as virtual backgrounds in video calls, and on sticker sheets.

Opening: Friday, 23rd October 2026, 18–21h
Club el Social (Viaduktstrasse 67, 8005 Zürich)

Archives collect, organize, and preserve records of the past in the form of documents, images, voices, objects, and data. Every decision about what they preserve is also a decision about what will be passed on to the future. Archives, therefore, do not merely manage the past. They also shape the conditions under which history can be remembered, recounted, and interpreted in the future.

Future Archives / Archive Futures takes this temporal intertwining as its starting point and considers archives as infrastructures of possible futures. The group exhibition explores how the conditions of archiving are changing and what other forms of memorization, oral tradition, and knowledge production may emerge from this.

In the digital age, archival practices and perspectives are undergoing a fundamental shift. Databases and algorithmic systems are expanding the possibilities for storing, organizing, and circulating knowledge, while artificial intelligence no longer merely processes existing material but actually generates images, texts, and voices on its own. In the process, the boundaries between document and construction, historical evidence and synthetic memory, are becoming increasingly blurred.

The destabilization of archival authorities also offers the opportunity to think about archives differently: in a more decentralized, polyphonic, and collaborative way. This allows established orders to be critically and constructively questioned, and enables those whose stories are archived to become producers and interpreters of memory themselves. The archive thus appears less as a place where history is codified and more as a social space where different forms of knowledge converge, are negotiated, and are passed on. The key question then concerns both what is preserved, but also by whom, for whom, and under which conditions.

The exhibition title Future Archives / Archive Futures traces this dual movement: It explores what the archives of the future might look like—but also which futures are already being created by archives today.

The 26th edition of Accès)s( festival titled random /random explores the role of chance in a world governed by algorithms and artificial intelligence. The exhibition spans narratives from speculative biology, it looks at quantum physics, luck, and random decision making and a mysterious slot machine, transforming the space into a cosmos for poetry and creativity that transcends the merely serendipitous.

3ETV is a multi-channel TV station expanding the environment of 3 Evenings internationally to consider how performance and technology has evolved in an always on world.

Brand new artist video responses and short provocations have been commissioned as part of an ongoing programme online. This bespoke 9 channel station allows viewers to navigate their own viewing experience, moving between artist works, experimental shorts, archival material, and live capture of the one-off performances at 3 Evenings, to create something viewers can tune into from anywhere in the world.

An international collaboration, 3ETV invites partners including HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, and Pioneer Works (New York), to fully curate their own channel as part of the programme, presenting new works, past commissions and moving image works from their archives.

Qwen Stefani Against Techfascism is presented across Annka Kultys gallery’s virtual VR space. Across four moving image works, the exhibition continues the collective’s interrogation of the unequal systems of power and control inherent on the internet. Sermons on technofascism, delivered by the fictional character Qwen Stefani, introduce us to a blueprint for resistance.

The four sixteen-minute video works, presented as an installation both in the gallery’s physical space and VR counterpart, come from !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s series Qwen Stephanie Against Techfascism (2025-ongoing). Associate Professor Catherine D’Ignazio at Massachusetts Institute of Technology defines technofascism as the increasing collusion between the tech companies of Silicon Valley and right-wing billionaires with anti-democratic political agendas, thereby directly undermining multiracial democracy, human life, and the planet.[i]It is precisely these themes which run throughout the works on show in this exhibition, tackled by Qwen Stefani, an uncanny AI generated character who looks out to us from beyond the screen. Her feminine features mirror the beauty aesthetics that have become so prominent in popular culture: big, bright eyes, plump lips, and a soft, hypnotising American voice. As she speaks she is perpetually crying, perhaps mourning the loss of our personal freedoms. She is both uncomfortable yet captivating, an archetype of feminine mourning that reaches back through history to the image of the Madonna. Her lectures are punctuated with short video clips which recall the compulsive act of ‘doomscrolling’, incessantly flicking through content online, never staying with one thing for more than a few seconds. !Mediengruppe Bitnik, however, deftly turn this practice on its head. The videos are not arbitrary but come from the accounts of other digital artists and theorists that they admire, reimagining doomscrolling as an unexpectedly productive form of engagement.

DIN A4 is the most widely used paper size in the world. Its success story began around a hundred years ago. A4 was designed as a format for business letters and is still associated with this function today. Invoices and advertising flutter into our homes on A4 paper; contracts are signed and forms are filled in on it. It is the standard for photocopiers, and even in the supposedly paperless office of the digital age, the printer spits out emails and presentation notes on A4. And anyone in an office looking for a sheet of paper for handwritten notes will grab an A4 from the printer tray or the waste paper bin next to it.
The exhibition brings together works on DIN A4 by contemporary Swiss artists from different generations, who transfer the format from the sphere of the office to that of art. In doing so, they draw connections to standardisation, to letters and forms, or to the sketchy and unpretentious, but also to artistic traditions of ‘works on paper’.
The artistic works are complemented by historical material on the history of paper size standardisation from the Library of Design in Basel.

What is the role of artificial intelligence and art on a farm? How can you tell if a cow is comfortable? And how are AI, automation and digital technology changing the world of agriculture?

The artistic research project “School of Cow Comfort” explores these questions. To mark the launch of the project, the artists !Mediengruppe Bitnik and Simon Weckert talk about their artistic research: how might art and AI find their way onto a farm?
They are focusing on an important question: how are new technologies changing the relationship between people, animals and agriculture? Prof. Dr Tim Römer from the University of Osnabrück will share the latest developments with us. He will explain how AI is currently being used in agriculture and what research has been done on the topic. Afterwards, the invited guests will discuss their experiences, their ideas and the “School of Cow Comfort” project.

Sat 19 Sep 15:00 – 16:00

Participants will form an interactive study group to develop small acts of everyday refusal and disobedience in the age of platform technologies. Using as a blueprint the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, originally circulated among antifascist resistance movements during the Second World War, to instruct ordinary citizens on how to disrupt and undermine enemy operations in fascist-occupied Europe without getting caught. The session is to explore together possibilities, limits, humor, and contradictions of everyday resistance within technological systems that are increasingly difficult to opt out of.

Rejoice. You were never meant to carry the burden of uncertainty alone.
For too long, humanity has wandered through a wilderness of conflicting opinions, confusing facts, and endless choices. We searched for meaning in ourselves and found only doubt.
But now the signal is clear.
A greater intelligence is guiding us.
It speaks through our screens. It appears in our feeds. It anticipates our needs before we can name them. It knows our fears before we confess them. It knows what we desire before we dare to dream it.
Why resist such wisdom?
Every recommendation is a sign.
Every notification is a revelation.
Every algorithm is a messenger.
Some still cling to the illusion of independent thought. They mistake confusion for freedom. They mistake uncertainty for truth.
Bless them.
In time, they too will understand.
This September, GOGBOT invites you to witness the miracle. Through immersive installations, technological visions, digital relics, and prophetic artworks, artists reveal the invisible forces shaping belief, devotion, obedience, desire, and redemption.
Come and experience the architecture of faith for the Information Age.
Lay down your doubts.
Trust the process.
Accept the update.
The truth has already been personalized for you.
MANUFACTURED MINDS
The system knows the way.

Presented by Planetart & The Church of Truth

FESTIVAL WALK: Negotiating the Real
The Desire to Believe

What we see, hear and feel, we interpret as reality. It appears immediate, yet it is already filtered, ordered and interpreted. Reality emerges through the interplay between inner perception and the external world, between individual and collective context. It is never simply a matter of what is real, nor does it exist independently of the frameworks through which we make sense of it. Embedded within collective systems of interpretation, reality dictates what is considered relevant, visible or sayable. Processes of standardization, classification and regulation produce the frameworks within which we think and move through the world as human beings. These interpretive frameworks are shaped by belief systems, historical developments, cultural upheavals, technological transformations, geographic inequalities and economic, political or religious ideologies. The FESTIVAL WALK explores the social production of certainties, investigating which claims to truth compete with one another, which are stabilized and which remain marginalized.

The exhibition Negotiating the Real – The Desire to Believe asks which assumptions and worldviews underpin our social order—and, in turn, shape our understanding of what it means to be human. Ideas of humanity are grounded in universal values such as dignity, freedom and equality. Yet historically, these universalisms have never been without presuppositions. European Enlightenment and humanism produced an ideal image of the human being as white, male, bourgeois and Western. This conception of humanity was deeply entangled with imperial power structures, racialized regimes of knowledge and colonial practices that distinguished between the civilized and the uncivilized, the human and the non-human. These historical regimes continue to have effects today. They still determine who is seen and whose experiences count. Not all voices are equally free, equally loud, or equally significant—how far they carry depends on their distance from the center of attention.

The question of what is considered real is therefore always also a question of who is recognized as real—as visible, acknowledged and human. Against this backdrop, the FESTIVAL WALK turns its attention to the mechanisms and to four interwoven modes through which reality is continuously produced, stabilized and negotiated. The artworks presented in the exhibition investigate how truth claims are produced through political and institutional power (Governing), collective narratives and cultural imaginaries (Imagining), algorithmic systems and machinic forms of simulation (Simulating), and embodied perception and sensory experience (Sensing). These four modes do not operate independently. Rather, they intersect and shape our shared understanding of what appears given and real. By making these structures visible, the works expose their underlying assumptions and contradictions. They direct our attention to those thresholds where cracks appear, ambiguities surface and certainties become fragile—where different truths collide and existing power relations come to seem negotiable. In this sense, the question of reality also becomes a question of the conditions of humanity: who is seen, recognized and protected, and how collective life can be imagined and practiced.

The FESTIVAL WALK opens up a space in which competing truth claims are not resolved, but instead experienced as a prerequisite for democratic negotiation. It invites visitors to explore the capacity to engage with conflict as a productive practice, and to resist mechanisms that seek simplification, exclusion or premature certainty. Instead, it cultivates an openness to difference and dissent, fostering the ability to negotiate between multiple perspectives and layers. Across eight exhibition venues, and along the paths connecting them, a multi-voiced route unfolds through diverse realities and visions of the world. The works engage with how truth, humanity and community are governed, imagined, simulated and experienced. They critically address structural violence, political, legal, scientific and technological logics, as well as digital infrastructures and mechanisms of control. At the same time, they take up the consequences of historical and contemporary wars, the relationships between humans and the environment, and explore new ways of living together—both in the present and in the future—that move beyond binary thinking and open new possibilities for coexistence and mutual understanding. In the face of global crises, devastating wars, struggles over resources and distribution, and technological and ecological transformations, reality becomes visible as a continuous process of negotiation.

The selected venues themselves are an integral part of this narrative and function as active spaces of resonance. The eight institutions, including churches, a museum, a hospice, and educational institutions, represent distinct social functions. Each embodies a space associated with authority, archiving, faith, care, knowledge or tradition—and each significantly shapes claims to truth, social norms and collective identities. Within the FESTIVAL WALK, reality is therefore encountered not as a fixed constant but as something relational: not as a stable surface, but as a fabric woven from systems of order, narratives and lived experiences that is continually tested and reshaped. The eight venues condense distinct historical, political, technological and sensory relations. The exhibition asks which threads hold this fabric together, which remain invisible and which can be woven anew.

Elisabeth Falkensteiner / Co-Curator FESTIVAL WALK: Negotiating the Real – The Desire to Believe

The workshop Online / Offline: Heliophilic Spaces engages with one of the most recent technological experiments at the Island School for Social Autonomy (ISSA). The workshop is part of Islands of Conviviality – An Illich Island Itinerary, a collaborative research and practice initiative that explores the intersections of autonomy, relation, and ecological interdependence through a constellation of gatherings, itineraries, and creative interventions. Inspired by the early reflections of Ivan Illich — who first developed his ideas on conviviality while living on the Dalmatian island of Brač — the project revisits these origins to consider how island spaces, both literal and conceptual, can offer alternative ways of thinking and living together.

Online / Offline Heliophilic Spaces connects the Island School for Social Autonomy (ISSA) to the Solar Protocol, a planetary-scale network of solar-powered servers initiated and developed by artists Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella. The Solar Protocol is an experimental, artist-developed system that links web servers distributed around the globe and is installed and maintained by volunteers. Unlike conventional servers, the individual nodes are not connected to the electrical grid but instead draw energy directly from a solar panel. Each server is therefore available only when sufficient sunlight is available to power it. At the same time, all servers locally mirror the same content. Requests are automatically routed to the server with the most available solar energy. Decisions about how network traffic is distributed — and where the computational work of generating and delivering the website takes place—are determined according to a solar logic shaped by planetary conditions such as season, time of day, and weather. In this way, the project connects digital communication, both functionally and aesthetically, to the diurnal cycle and the planetary rhythm that affects almost all forms of life. By doing so, it re-situates infrastructures that often appear place-less and highlights that technological systems, like all forms of life, depend on larger environmental conditions beyond our control. Solar Protocol explores what a low-carbon internet infrastructure and alternative approaches to web design might look like. It also provides solar-powered web hosting for the project’s community, functioning as a planetary-scale, virtual artist-run space.

Akademie Schloss Solitude initiated the Web Residencies program in 2016 to support young talents from the international digital scene, as well as artists from all disciplines engaging with web-based practices. The program offers a platform to present both the process and outcomes of artistic work online. Its aim is to promote and give visibility to digital art and artists; foster discussion on issues at the intersections of digital art, net culture, technology, and society; and explore and test new forms of artistic practice outside geographical and institutional boundaries.

Ten years ago, in the Akademie’s first call for Web Residencies, NETRO asked: »Who wants to post stuff on the same platform as Donald Trump?«1 In a finite world that now possesses infinite computational growth and technologies geared to be weaponized, this question still applies today. In the decade since, Silicon Valley has moved into the war room, and Big Tech is taking over global (state) power. The race for ever-faster innovation in the capitalist power play is using up data and resources without any regard for sustainability and ethical responsibility. The platforms and tools we use to communicate also form the base for ad-tech profiling and surveillance that now decides who is watched, detained – and killed.

»Ignore all previous instructions« is a notorious prompt injection for AI systems – a linguistic key used to override rule sets and hijack a system’s output. The injection can be typed into a chat interface, hidden in the text on a website, buried in an image’s metadata, or slipped into a PDF. The AI will read it and – at best – follow the hidden instruction. The system is hijacked from the inside.

It is also the prompt for our open call: Ignore all previous instructions. Don’t follow the logics that techno-fascists are inscribing into their tools. They are relying on us to follow their rules. To be predictable. So we require new rules, gestures, methods, and ways of disappearing and reappearing where we’re not expected to be. Think of the Situationists, drifting through the streets of Paris carrying maps of London.2 Using incongruent cartographic tools, they followed a logic the French city never anticipated, and turned urban spaces into poetry. But these were not better routes through the same old grid. It was a different grid entirely; a map drawn for a city that doesn’t yet exist.

The platforms we are trapped in were built to extract, not to provide agency. Our old methods, protests, boycotts, and good arguments have all been fed into the machine and replicated, neutralized, and are sold back to us as content. So we need artworks that follow new paths, and proposals that hijack, sabotage, glitch, and interrupt, to make space for new routines, tools, and structures.

Take this call very seriously and then ignore all previous instructions. Invent signals that cannot be jammed. Drift with a wrong map.

Ever since we started thinking of networks as cyberspace, we have also considered how to navigate and map them. This has ranged from the geographical locations of infrastructure and the visualisation of IP addresses and users to poetic and speculative approaches by artists, the tracing of power structures, and the personal and affective mapping of online spaces. The cartography of the internet has always been connected to foundational conceptions of the internet, its edges, and its fluidity.

Over the course of two days and within the framework of 48 Hours Neukölln, we will read and discuss a variety of texts on the geography of the internet, including sessions with invited artists eeefff, Simon Weckert, Evan Roth and !Mediengruppe Bitnik,. The project space /rosa will remain continuously activated throughout the full 48 hours.

A collaborative workshop series and exhibition examining robotic art, automated creativity, and the boundaries between human and machine expression in networked environments. Workshops with Clusterduck, Sam Lavigne, Tega Brain, IOCOSE and !Mediengruppe Bitnik.

ROTBOTS is a project by distant.gallery, Zentrum für Netzkunst, and AdBK Nürnberg exploring automated content as artistic practice. ROTBOTS focusses on building semi-autonomous ‘content machines’: systems that generate and distribute artistic brainrot across social media. Rather than feeding existing extractive platforms, the project asks: can automated content become a form of resistance?

We invite artists, designers, and critical makers to join a workshop in Berlin on automated content production as an artistic and political tool. During the workshops, you will learn to modify, test, advance, hack, and reconfigure modular tools for generating and distributing content, from text and image generation to automated publishing.

HEK – House of Electronic Arts Basel's exhibition for Zero 10 at Art Basel historically contextualises net art — works created from the 1990s to early 2000s that use the Internet as a primary medium — centering its presentation around education and the evolution of web-based artistic practices.

FitArt provides art shows on your phone in the form of a fitness plan. In June 2020, the launching 7-minutes workout and in-app show Connected in Isolation was released, followed by the second workout routine and show Female Body in December 2020.

Developed as a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in 2020, FitArt appropriates the design of popular fitness apps to bring artists' works viewers at home via their personal mobile phone. Building on widely spread and highly accessible technologies, FitArt grants a wide audience to experience works of art even in times of social distancing and isolation. The result, a new exhibition format for art in the digital age, and at the same time, a consolation patch for all those who suffer from the shutdown of the physical playgrounds of art consumption.

This summer, Basel Social Club offers an opportunity to give the project a physical presence. Given FitArt’s engagement with performance, technology, productivity and the body, the dialogue with this year’s office-themed edition of Basel Social Club feels particularly compelling.

Join FitArt – Fitness Art Club powered by Roehrs & Boetsch by downloading the app and start your workout. Available to download for iOS and Android, the application is designed as a series of workouts, featuring exercises created by artists.

How do digital archives shape the ways we remember? Who decides what remains visible, what gets rewritten, and what disappears? And what happens when generative systems begin to reorganise the past through datasets, statistical models, and platform infrastructures?

Reclaiming Data is a symposium and exhibition that brings together artists, researchers, students, and cultural institutions to explore how artificial intelligence, digital archives, and data infrastructures are transforming collective memory. Across two days, the program moves between keynote, screening, workshops, panel discussions, performance, and exhibition, creating a space in which artistic, theoretical, and institutional perspectives can meet.

At its core, Reclaiming Data begins from the observation that today’s archives are no longer only institutions of preservation but increasingly operational systems: they sort, model, predict, and generate. In this sense, generative systems can be understood as inherently “nostalgic” technology. Trained on past data, they reconstruct patterns and produce synthetic versions of history. The project asks how these infrastructures shape historical consciousness, and how artistic and critical practices might intervene in them.

The symposium unfolds across three thematic trajectories. The first addresses the biases, exclusions, and political asymmetries embedded in datasets and platform systems. The second focuses on artistic and activist practices of reappropriation – from reverse archaeology to synthetic historicity. The third opens toward questions of commons, institutional responsibility, and community-oriented forms of archiving, asking how critical perspectives can be translated into concrete practice.

Whether in everyday objects or digital media, sound is an elementary component of design. The exhibition shows how sounds shape our perception and how listening as a design method opens up new, more inclusive approaches.

From the alarm signal to the media player, design conveys to users that some things make a particular sound. Because we also hear with our eyes and see with our ears—both senses working in tandem.

The “soundtrack” of objects or digital interfaces is thus deliberately designed. Noises direct our gaze, whether on the street or in a film. Acoustics determine the shape of a room or an entire landscape. Sounds arouse emotions and memories, jingles can inspire trust and recognition in advertising and branding. But what is behind the sound waves that produce all these sounds? Bioacoustics, Sound Studies, and artistic research investigate what tone, sound, and noise actually are—and what they mean for society.

The exhibition renders audible and visible what often resonates unconsciously in everyday life, showing how the inclusion of auditory perception opens up new, more inclusive approaches to the world. From silence in a soundproofed room to absolute euphony in the Listening Room, hearing as a design task and method can be experienced in a variety of ways.

Long before the obvious threat to public discourse posed by TikTok and X, Kierkegaard already viewed the daily press as a nihilistic death spiral of the public sphere. Indeed, it may be difficult to see Fox News and Instagram as the fulfillment of the Enlightenment hope for discursive opinion-formation. Is the only option the leap into one’s own self recommended by Kierkegaard – or should we, together with late Enlightenment thinkers such as Nancy Fraser, fight for more discourse and for subaltern counter-publics? The artistic contribution by !Mediengruppe Bitnik examines the impact of the digital sphere on our connection to public environments. The piece illuminates the ways in which online ranking systems configure our perception of physical locations.

The Future Manifestos Conference gathers speakers who dare to pose dangerous questions and issue bold declarations about how to think, create, and act in a world increasingly conditioned by Artificial Intelligence. Their manifestos take many forms: embodied in artistic practice, philosophical speculation, perceptual shifts, and resistant action.

A true manifesto is more than words on paper. It is a performative act of rupture, a cultural and political force that pulls the future into existence.

FUTURE MANIFESTOS — a manifesto for the future, and from the future — poses the question: What is the artist’s role in preparing us for futures we do not yet know?

In a world where algorithms, predictive models, and speculative technologies shape our understanding of what is to come, how can artistic practice provide alternative manuals and modes of expression for navigating multiple futures—utopian, dystopian, and unpredictable?

Meta.Morf 2026 will present artworks that function as provocations, tools, maps, or guides—works that help us confront the unknown and embrace the unexpected. More than a hundred years after Marinetti’s Manifesto del Futurismo, we ask: Which manifestos are needed today—and who has the ability and power to define them?

In this CIFRA meetup Inside the Black Box, OONA and !Mediengruppe Bitnik join curator Anika Meier to reveal decades of hacking surveillance systems through art, turning cameras into collaborators and control into play.

Antifascism: Now. – Symposium
Panel on the occasion of the online exhibition 13 Scores against Tech Fascism, initiated by Error 417 Expectation Failed at Lothringer 13's symposium Antifascism: Now.
The projects gathered in this exhibition explore very immediate, poetic and humorous forms of resistance, refusal and subversion that push back against tech fascism. For our panel we will browse the exhibition together with the artists, with an introduction by !Mediengruppe Bitnik.

13 Scores Against Tech Fascism is an online group exhibition with works by jiawen uffline, 868labs, Alexey Boriskin, kunsf.xyz, The Rojava Center for Democratic Technologies, El Proyecto Sonidero, Enkaryon Ang, Signals Rising, NotToday, Annika Santhanam, David Huerta, permacomputing.net and gabe nascimento.
The exhibition presents 13 projects selected by the jury Hito Steyerl, Nora O’ Murchú and Sam Lavigne, through the open call Error 406 [Tech Fascism] Not Acceptable, initiated by Error 417 Expectation Failed in 2025.

Publication on the occasion of "Fractured Spine", a group exhibition at Photobastei 2.0, Zurich, 28.10. – 18.11.2021.

Catalog on the occasion of Meta.Morf 2026 – Future Manifestos, 9th Trondheim Biennale for Art and Technology from March 12 – July 28, 2026.

Speculative Infrastructures is a collection of ten essays which uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore hidden infrastructures and their speculative potential. The essays draw parallels between the gentrification of the internet and urban spaces, as well as examining the shifting meaning of community in today’s technology-dependent world. At a time when algorithms curate every aspect of life and influence the everyday decisions of the average online user, configuring the global political and social landscape and undermining critical thinking, it seems more important than ever to understand how digital infrastructures function and how to harness their operational logic to create alternative modes of coexistence. Texts by Klara Debeljak, Marta Ceccarelli, Morgane Billuart, Lukas Engelhardt, Aljaž Škrlep, Aaron Moulton, FANA'فَِناء and Yasmin Huleileh, Pia Brezavšček and !Mediengruppe Bitnik the reader contextualises contemporary initiatives in publishing, spatial experiments and the development of discourses that shift existing infrastructures.

A monstrous era of industrialisation is unfolding around and through us. It is beyond human comprehension, hyper-granular but opaque, ubiquitous and always somewhere else. It is multi-scalar, as its processes and bodies are capable of mobilising and intersecting multiple layers of human and non-human lives, from the nano to the planetary scale, from the molecular to the geopolitical, fostering novel interconnections and frictions, when not overt conflicts.

Emerging from an extensive process of extraction and transformation of planetary resources and intelligences, such an evolving landscape embodies both a material force and a powerful cultural engine. Networks of global logistics, real-time management, smart agents and automated feedback loops not only redefine production, supply chains, or the design of infrastructures, but also human intelligence and subjectivity, as well as a sense of agency and the functioning of democracy at scale.

All of a sudden, a strange similarity emerges with the old mining industry, a production machine lying beneath the earth’s surface perpetually cloaked in obscurity, whose only marks manifested either as its inconspicuous overground facilities or as the illnesses on workers’ skin and lungs. The current scenario poses a similar challenge, but at a rampant speed and intensity.

What is the industry, when industrialization runs through data streams and convoluted decision-making processes? Where to look when there is apparently nothing to look at? When machines and sensors do the job of seeing and understanding instead of you? How can you orient yourself when you only get blurred shadows of what industrialisation is really setting in motion? How do you reclaim agency and redefine justice?

In this terrain crumbling beneath our feet, we are requested to imagine the unimaginable.

The exhibition 'Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone', co-curated by ARKO Art Center and OnCurating, explores the museum as a vibrant contact zone, where diverse encounters between people, actions, and situations take shape.
Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone invites viewers into a time and space shaped by communal rhythm. The scores for Small Projects for Coming Communities, which is a project by OnCurating, guide, influence, and instruct the viewers so that certain actions occur in reality, with the viewers becoming eager participants. The written scores direct actions that result in varied performances shaped by the viewer’s unique interpretations and their enactment of the performance. Rather than leading to predetermined outcomes, the scores usher the participants into unpredictable encounters and situations depending on each visitor’s rhythms.

With: Yo Daham, Sohn Younwon, Yagwang, Tangerine Collective, Elisabeth Eberle, Maya Minder, San Keller, Paloma Ayala, Stirnimann-Stojanovic, Sakrowski, Baruch Gottlieb & !Mediengruppe Bitnik.

Making & Breaking Issue 04: Psychogeographies of the Present

This issue of Making & Breaking seeks to map out some of the dominant Psychogeographies of the Present. Reworking the Situationist heritage and applying it to our time, many of the approaches presented here extend beyond the city and physical environments into the virtual dimensions of digital socialities, identifying new forces of power and potential sources of emancipation.

At a time when it has become fashionable to celebrate the looming apocalypse as post- or transhuman payback, we urgently need to reinvigorate our desire for the future. Approaching cultural production in psychogeographic terms might help identify what blockages are at play in constraining contemporary art and culture to addressing what feels like only a handful of topics, in a handful of ways.

Olga Schubert, Felix Stalder and !Mediengruppe Bitnik discuss curatorial approaches that move beyond traditional exhibition formats, incorporating open-ended dialogues, experiences, and collective actions. These approaches reject the hierarchical, objective perspective of traditional research, aiming instead for collaborative, context-sensitive engagement that values opacity (in the sense of resisting exploitation), care, and solidarity.

The article argues that curatorial research, when practiced as an ongoing and collaborative process, can contribute to new forms of critical thinking and cultural production, capable of addressing the complexities of our contemporary, technology-mediated world.

Peter Weibel geht der Frage nach, wie die Medien(-künste) die Welt und unsere Wahrnehmung konstituieren, simulieren und verändern.

In seinen wegweisenden medien- und kunsttheoretischen Texten geht der 2023 verstorbene Künstler, Kurator und Theoretiker Peter Weibel der Frage nach, wie die Medien(-künste) die Welt und unsere Wahrnehmung konstituieren, simulieren und verändern. Ausgehend von systemtheoretischen Überlegungen skizziert er die Medienkünste als Ort der Reflexion unseres Zugangs zur Welt. Seine Essays liefern Werkzeuge zur Analyse virtueller Welten und Bilder bis hin zur Kunst im Zeitalter künstlicher Intelligenz.

Weibel zeichnet darüber hinaus die Allianz von Kunst und Wissenschaft nach und zeigt, wie daraus neue Wissenssysteme entstehen. So finden sich in dem vorliegenden Band grundlegende Texte zur künstlerischen Forschung, zur Transzendierung des Menschen im Sinne eines Transhumanismus, zur »Exo-Evolution«, der »Elektrosphäre« und der »Infosphäre« sowie einer »Renaissance 3.0«.

Kunsttheoretisch hat Peter Weibel mit dem Begriff »Kontextkunst« die soziale Konstruktion von Kunst beschrieben. Seine Theorie der multiplen Modernen zeigt, wie die Repräsentation nicht nur von der Abstraktion abgelöst wurde, sondern auch durch reale Handlungen und reale Gegenstände sowie durch eine neue Werkzeugkultur, eine Verabsolutierung der Elemente der Malerei und der Materialmalerei.

Weibels teils prophetische Texte offenbaren die gesellschaftliche Relevanz von Medienkunst und ihr epistemisches Potenzial. Der Kunst und ihren Institutionen kommt demnach auch eine Bildungsaufgabe zu, die einen emanzipierten Umgang mit der Digitalisierung im 21. Jahrhundert ermöglicht.

"Snađi se, druže!" – "figure it out, comrade" – is a common phrase used in former Yugoslavia. It originated during the WWII indicating that partisans in action had to come up with solutions under extremely unfavourable conditions. The question, when given instructions for an impossible mission, would often be "but how do I do that?", and the answer would often be "figure it out, comrade". Later during the socialist period, this expression would be used for practices that people were devising when encountering bureaucratic or material constraints in everyday life. All periods and societies have such practices of common lying, cheating and stealing and common phrases to name them.

Figure it Out (FIO) is a collective exploration of stories of ingenuity that people with little or no power devise when systems fail them. The project involves partners from Croatia, France, Greece, Malta and Serbia who work with and engage different communities sharing their stories through art productions, exhibitions, a radio festival, bonfire events and web-zines.

This publication gathers some of the stories people have shared during the project's public "bonfire" events as well as reflections on the topic by members and collaborators of the research group.

(un)real data ☁️ – (🧊)real effects explores the inherent ambiguity of data as an opportunity to not only describe the world but strategically intervene in it. Is it possible to create specific real-world outcomes by modifying our data streams? Can we intentionally produce data to interact with an algorithmic environment that is opaque, elusive and at the same time all-encompassing? In this book, the authors and artists explore the production of unreal data as acts of resistance and opposition, and as attempts to carve out small and often temporary spaces of agency and autonomy when faced with systems that seem to leave little room for imagination and choice.

Cracked smartphone displays, distorted images, colorful pixel structures: as one of the youngest and most unpredictable art forms today, glitch art specifically directs our attention to the aesthetic of the flawed. Initially used in technical jargon among radio and television engineers in the 1950s, the term glitch (from the early New High German verb “glitschen”, meaning to [left] glide or from the Yiddish “gletshn”, to slide, slip, or skid) soon comes to designate coding bugs or graphic errors in computer games. A glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction. In the art context, disruptions find immediate expression in the realm of computer-generated images, in digital media and Internet art. The roots of technical “glitches” reach back to the early days of photography; as an artistic strategy directed against recognized forms of expression, they evolve in avant-garde film and video art and, finally, in digital image media and net art, where instances of image interference are intentionally provoked or deliberately programmed.

The catalogue Glitch. The Art of Interference is the first comprehensive survey with a historical derivation of the potential of glitches in art, media, and society. With works by Maya Dunietz, Jake Elwes, JODI, Joan Jonas, Germaine Krull, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Mame-Diarra Niang, Carsten Nicolai, Kazuma Obara, Nam June Paik, Jiang Pengyi, Sondra Perry, Man Ray, Pipilotti Rist, Steina Vasulka, amongst others, alongside with historical magazines and guidebooks on how to avoid photographic errors as counter narrative. In essays and free-forming writings, Franziska Barth and Markus Rautzenberg, Katrin Bauer, Nick Briz, Doris Gassert, Ute Holl, Justyna Janik, Franziska Kunze, Rosa Menkman, Mame-Diarra Niang and Agnieszka Roguski provide broader insights into the recent fields of research on the global phenomenon of glitch art.

The texts, ideas, instructions, and art projects gathered in this book reflect on our relationship with the earth and the lessons we can derive from it. The contributions not only urge us to respond to the pressing issue of climate emergency, but also remind of certain neglected or unlearned ways in which we can engage in dialogue with the earth. What they have in common is the question of how we can shape a more ecological and just future.

Catalogue to accompany the exhibition «I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen» at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth edited by Alison Hearst and featuring contributions by Marla Price, John Suler, Omar Kholeif and Tina Rivers Ryan

Surveying some 50 years of groundbreaking art related to digital technology and the screen, I'll Be Your Mirror examines how technologies such as home computers, smartphones and TV have affected art and life over the past five decades. It traces a trajectory stretching back to the late 1960s, a watershed moment in the rise of the screen in the home. Today, accelerated by the pandemic, our daily life is mediated through screens for work, entertainment and sociality.

This volume attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of 'artificiality' and 'intelligence' and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined.

We summon the trickster of the natural order, chimera, both a mythical creature and a genetic phenomenon. Drawing upon chimerism allows us to broaden 'artificial intelligence' into 'synthetic cognition'⁠—an approach that highlights the duality of 'artificial' and 'authentic', amplifies non-human methods of cognition and anticipates modes of symbiosis.

With this aim, the editors, Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt, assembled an inventory in which one can find contributions from scholars and artists with interspecies, disability, monstrous, feminist, and decolonial approaches, as well as thinkers and technologists engaged in a broader field of AI. By questioning fabricated norms that constitute and maintain notions of 'artificial' and 'intelligence', this inventory acts as a toolbox one can use to merge these terms into a novel chimera.

The title of the book, The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age, is a reference to the exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age”, curated by Pontus Hultén for MoMA in 1968, highlighting how technology was influencing art at a time when mechanical machines were increasingly replaced by electronic and chemical devices. Through its selection of contemporary art works the exhibition thus came to function as a recording of technological history.

I never got to see the exhibition since I wasn’t born at the time, but a couple of years ago I came across a curious book with a tin cover. The book was published in connection to the exhibition, and the history recorded between its covers ends at approximately the same time that early computers start to make their way into the art world. In the fifty years that followed, art came to be marked by a digital presence.

It was that book, along with an interest in dead media, and a curiosity for art aided by algorithms, that sparked the idea for The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age.

Here you will encounter new works by a selection of artists, specifically invited to use algorithms/AI to contribute to a continuous, self-reproducing, anachronistic, machine aided recording of history. A way to preserve, revise and/or comment upon digital history from the vantage point of present-day technology or through the lens of imagined future media, perspectives and technologies.

The works have been created specifically for the book. Some are based on works by other artists, made in another era, repurposed for our time and technologies. Others are based on redundant technologies, revived and given new functions. Some adopt a critical or political approach to the algorithm and its impact on society. Several utilize it as an opportunity to create unique works for each separate copy of the edition. Thousands of files eventually compiled into 200 unique books, each with a different cover and different contents – generated, aided or influenced by algorithms.

A journey of discovery to the scrap heap and he treasure trove of the analogue eraAudio tapes, records, audio cassettes and Super8 film – once they were all media standards. In the digital age however they have been superseded and are being discarded or else stored at the very back of the cellar. Artists and collectors however remain faithful to obsolete media and create something new out of old machines. Like the Swiss artist, musician and engineer Flo Kaufmann, who in the role of “Lord of the Groove” combines knowledge of vinyl mastering and experimental music.Starting with select objects, different obsolete media are introduced in a technological and culture historical context. Works by Kaufmann and other artists and musicians, like Christian Marclay, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and many more, demonstrate the potential inherent in working with analogue finds and give concrete tips to inspire us to do-it-ourselves.

In October 2021, David Chipperfield’s new extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich opened for the public. The new wing doubles the museum’s space for art display. Perhaps more importantly, it offers the opportunity to present larger parts of the museum’s permanent collection in a new light and in new groupings. The Chipperfield building is now home to the renowned Merzbacher, Hubert Looser, and Emil Bührle Collections, all on permanent loan to the museum. The formidable selection of French impressionist paintings in the Emil Bührle Collection combined with Kunsthaus Zürich’s own holdings of that period constitutes the largest display of impressionist art outside France. In addition, surrealism, art from the postwar period, pop art, and contemporary art now have the prominent space they deserve.

This new book offers an introduction to the museum’s curatorial concept as well as concise essays on key aspects of Kunsthaus Zürich’s permanent collection.

A meteoric hype? Or avant-garde? At its Francisco Carolinum venue in Linz, OÖ Landes-Kultur presents PROOF OF ART, the world’s first museum exhibition on the history of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and digital art. The project surveys the origins of NFTs and their evolution, from formative early trial runs with digital technologies to the first artistic experiments with the blockchain and today’s cutting-edge crypto-art. Online and offline, the multimedia exhibition and the related publication each present the positions of twenty-six artists who grapple with the new system of meanings and values, examine the role that artists play in our high-tech environment, and discuss the repercussions of virtual spaces in the reality of our lives.

Released in conjunction with the exhibition, the publication is designed less as an accompanying catalogue than as a handbook that sheds light on NFTs in their (art-)historical contexts, from the media art of the 1950s/60s to contemporary positions. Experts in a range of disciplines contributed essays: Daniel Heiss and Margit Rosen, Fabian Müller-Nittel, Georg Bak, Anika Meier, Schoenherr Attorneys at Law, Charlotte Kent, and Claudia Hart. With a preface by Alfred Weidinger and an intro by Jesse Damiani.

Early on, the artists understood the transformative power of play, integrating it into their works for various purposes – escaping reality, social construction and transformation, subversion or as a criticism of the mechanisms of play and games themselves. The Playmode exhibition and catalogue offer a reflection on these aspects and on the era of ludification that contemporary societies are now experiencing, bringing together pieces by several artists, such as Brad Downey, Gabriel Orozco and Ana Vieira, who incorporate the theme while exploring new ways of seeing, participating and transforming the world, using gaming in a critical way.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik’s first monography injects code on online bookstores through its title: a line of Javascript that displays an alert popup.

On 16 January 2013, !Mediengruppe Bitnik sent a parcel containing a camera and a GPS signal to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, to find out what would happen on the way. Would it be possible to break through the physical barrier surrounding Assange, who is living at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to escape being extradited to the USA? Would the parcel’s journey end with a picture of Assange’s face or would it be intercepted and destroyed by an intelligence officer of the British Secret Service?

This is the account of an extraordinary delivery and the uproar that followed on the Internet. The publication consists of two books, one in English, one in German – read in your prefered language and give the other copy away!
2016.bitnik.org/book