UN_CTRL – Festival for Convivial Technologies and Art

11:00–14:00

and

15:00–17:00

Drop-in Workshop: 0.01% Person by rawlab.xyz

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the dividual, the workshop explores how individuals become datafied dividuals as algorithmic abstractions of the visual world reduce bodies and identities to probabilistic data structures. Using real-time image recognition and printed cut-outs from publicly available machine-learning datasets for face and body recognition, participants can experiment with the fragmentation and recombination of visual identities.

Meet the Artists
partly in German

During this time, all the artists that are present at the festival will hang around in the exhibition space. Join us, explore, and discuss! 

Keynote: Re-considering tools for conviviality in an age of platform AI by Andreas Beinsteiner 

With his reflections on Tools for Conviviality, philosopher Ivan Illich was one of the key figures shaping discourses around the issues explored at this festival. Central to Illich’s thinking is the connection between social practices and structures, on the one hand, and the structure of our technologies, on the other. He contrasted his vision of a convivial society with the industrial society of the 1970s and prioritized the free and open shaping of tools, practices, and social exchange over what was perceived as industrial efficiency – arguing that the latter invariably tends towards monopolization, technocracy, and ultimately to an utterly destructive reversal of means and ends. We will reconsider his criteria for assessing the conviviality of technologies – with the purpose of utilizing those criteria as conceptual tools for exploring what is at stake in our hyperindustrial present. Central issues will be technological complexity, scale, and diversity, along with questions of knowledge and power.

Discussion: Emancipatory Cybernetics (working title)

Tiara Roxanne & David Muñoz-Alcántara, moderated by Alistair Hudson

Drop-in Workshop: De-amazon your kindle by Yasha Jain and Matthieu Vlaminck-Maurer

Activation of Rope by Ief Spincemaille together with visitors

Let’s activate Rope! An oversized rope, hand-braided. Several people can carry it together. You can lie on it, play, sleep, and create abstract forms with it. It looks like a toy, but it is a work of art. Treat it gently. Like a book or a drawing. We will explore it together.

A walk through and around the museum with visitors carrying a 60 meter long Rope of 30 cm in diameter, creating three different shapes: a circle, line and spiral.

Keynote: Cartography of the Unconvivial by Vladan Joler

Drawing on his counter-cartographic investigations, Vladan Joler explores technologies that concentrate power while limiting our capacity to understand, shape, and challenge them. Tracing the connections between AI, surveillance, resource extraction, and hidden labor, this keynote moves beyond technological interfaces to examine the infrastructures and power relations beneath them. How can mapping these systems become a practice of resistance and help us imagine technologies grounded in autonomy, collective agency, and mutual care? How can we create alternative social and technical infrastructures to empower collective agency in the Age of Resistance?

Performance: Precursing by Nina Davies

Precursing is a film revolving around a fictional incident: a self-driving car, trained to predict pedestrian movements, is involved in an accident. Across two conversations, four characters discuss ghosts, ritual and the future of the justice system. Precursing is the dance at the centre of these conversations. During the festival, it leaves the screen and appears in the spaces around it. Visitors may encounter the dancers unexpectedly. Drawing on TikTok’s non-player character (NPC) dance trends, the performance interprets these movements as a subconscious plea to escape a present shaped by predictive technologies, many of which are trained in fictional environments such as video games. The work asks what it means to move in ways a machine might predict, at a time when AI is increasingly used to forecast futures in finance, law, transport and insurance.

Concert: Untitled by Audrey Chen and Nick Klein

Audrey Chen and Nick Klein’s collaboration explores the shifting interplay between voice and electronics, moving fluidly between distinction and symbiosis while pushing towards extremes of dynamics and affect. Together they explore the interplay of improvisation in its most tangible form. Working around the erratic pulses of Nick’s modular electronics, Audrey’s voice reacts and swiftly counters, like an elegant dance between two otherworldly forms. Each maintains the distinct character of their own practice, while remaining completely responsive to the movements of the other.

Movement and awareness session Skin Pleasure with Klaut

partly in German

We carry 1.5 to 2 square meters of skin through our everyday lives, constantly in contact with our surroundings. This session invites you to try out techniques for sensing our surfaces. Drawing on elements of body scan, guided imagery, and movement improvisation, we celebrate our contact surface with the world. Feel free to come in comfortable clothing. All bodies are welcome.

Keynote: Technology Embracing Boredom by Caroline Sinders

What is digital addiction, beyond buzzwords and pearl-clutching, and how does it impact our well-being and safety? In this talk, artist and human rights researcher Caroline Sinders will share some of their human rights research and artistic work centered on pro-social and pro-user provocations. This work explores the power of boredom, the neurological need for rest, and the importance of user led maintenance, stewarding, design and cooperation for platforms and technology. 

Drop-in Workshop: Reciclajes — Building the PET Commons

Over the course of the workshop, participants transform discarded PET bottles, the emblematic waste of consumer society, into a collective garden of light. Each bottle becomes home to a low-consumption green LED, powered by electricity, and programmed to flicker in response to movement and ambient stimuli. Assembled together, the bottles grow into fences, hedges and “hybrid gardens.” Working as bricoleurs, participants learn open, replicable methods for simple circuitry and upcycling while reflecting on how circuits, solar cells and living ecology need not be opposites, and they can be seen as one garden where nature and technology coexist. 

Concept by Francesco Mariotti, Facilitator Esteban Coronel

Performance Lecture Oops, I’m Scrolling Again by Yasha Jain with Laura Benetschik

Attention has become one of the defining problems of our age. From the rise of advertising to social media platforms, the technologies around us have increasingly learned to capture, shape, and monetize our attention.
Why is it so difficult to put our phones down, stop scrolling, or resist the next notification? Is resisting the screen an individual failure, or a systemic one? And is this the first time in history that we have faced a challenge of this scale?
This talk explores the economic, technological, and historical systems behind the attention economy; how humans have become the resource that fuels the economy.
The performance-lecture will open into a collective discussion, inviting the audience to reflect on their own experiences, habits, and relationships with technology. What do we want from technology, what does it ask of us in return, and how might we imagine a different relationship with our screens?

Drop-in Workshop: Kitchen Ferm Lab by Max Kosorić and Fanny Kranz, in association with Johannes Marmon 

The Kitchen Ferm Lab invites visitors to make their own DIY vinegar from apple scraps, creating a homemade ferment to use in their own kitchen. Participants can sample a selection of apple creations and ferments.

Activation of Rope by Ief Spincemaille together with visitors

Let’s activate Rope! An oversized rope, hand-braided. Several people can carry it together. You can lie on it, play, sleep, and create abstract forms with it. It looks like a toy, but it is a work of art. Treat it gently. Like a book or a drawing. We will explore it together.

A walk through and around the museum with visitors carrying a 60 meter long Rope of 30 cm in diameter, creating three different shapes: a circle, line and spiral.

Conversation and presentation with Tara Kelton and Herdimas Anggara, participants in Web Residencies No. 22, Ignore All Previous Instructions, at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, moderated by Sarah Donderer (Co-Director of SCOPE – Solitude Collaborative Platform for Art, Science & Digital Cultures and Program Coordinator for Digital Cultures at the Akademie Schloss Solitude)

A collaboration between the Akademie Schloss Solitude and the ZKM | Karlsruhe

Workshop/Protocol Activation: Bankanga InterTropical: Feiticinhos – Casting Spells for a Post-Money Bank 
With Bankanga InterTropical (Luiza Crosman, Théo Ferreira Gomes, Juan Pablo García Sossa, Pablo Somonte Ruano & Tatyana Zambrano)

Bankanga InterTropical is a participatory artistic research laboratory exploring how longstanding traditions of reciprocity and choreographies of circulation practiced across the Tropical Belt can inform contemporary forms of decentralized coordination. Through collective experimentation, participants investigate how trust, value, and exchange can be organized beyond monetary transactions and centralized institution.
Drawing from reciprocal systems such as ROSCAs, susu, chilimbas, tontines, arisan, and numerous local traditions of mutual aid, participants collectively explore alternative forms of exchange and coordination.

Bankanga InterTropical is a participatory artistic research laboratory exploring how longstanding traditions of reciprocity and choreographies of circulation practiced across the Tropical Belt can inform contemporary forms of decentralized coordination. Through collective experimentation, participants investigate how trust, value, and exchange can be organized beyond monetary transactions and centralized institution.

Drawing from reciprocal systems such as ROSCAs, susu, chilimbas, tontines, arisan, and numerous local traditions of mutual aid, participants collectively explore alternative forms of exchange and coordination.

Performance: Precursing by Nina Davies

Precursing is a film revolving around a fictional incident: a self-driving car, trained to predict pedestrian movements, is involved in an accident. Across two conversations, four characters discuss ghosts, ritual and the future of the justice system. Precursing is the dance at the centre of these conversations. During the festival, it leaves the screen and appears in the spaces around it. Visitors may encounter the dancers unexpectedly. Drawing on TikTok’s non-player character (NPC) dance trends, the performance interprets these movements as a subconscious plea to escape a present shaped by predictive technologies, many of which are trained in fictional environments such as video games. The work asks what it means to move in ways a machine might predict, at a time when AI is increasingly used to forecast futures in finance, law, transport and insurance.

Sound Performance: Corazón de Robota by Constanza Piña Pardo

Corazón de Robota presents a fully analog stage setup: synthesizers, sequencers, filters, distortions, circuit-bent drum machines, antennas, electromagnetic field amplifiers, and experimental radios, creating a non-standard modular system—a Latinrack.
She translates memories of Andean minerals, the Pacific Ocean, and the cosmos into sound. Through improvisation, she brings her sonic imaginary to life in dissonant atmospheres shaped by textures, feedback, and random patterns. Her soundscapes traverse audible and inaudible frequencies in a journey of psychophysical perception and the demodulation of cosmic messages, leading audiences into a sonic trance that explores the rhythmic dimensions of noise.
The devices of Corazón de Robota embody technofeminist philosophy, electronic anarchy, and open-source hardware.

Book Reading: Hardware and Eco-Feminist Art: Hacking and Artistic Practices Towards Ethical Technology by Patrícia J. Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz

It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains plastics and raw materials mined from conflict regions. Can we move beyond this oppressive system of extraction to find ethical alternatives? Feminist hackers Patrícia Reis and Stefanie Wuschitz discuss developing technology through eco-feminist artistic tools, rooted in care economies, local knowledges and collective survival. Through an intensive knowledge-sharing process and collaboration with peers, they unpack eco-feminist theory and practices to propose resistance strategies grounded in ethical hardware and de-growth economies – contributing significantly to the new field of arts-based research.

Conversation: Talking Fruits with Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro and Margaux Schwab

partly in German 

How can we keep orchard meadows alive? Traditional orchard meadows are among the most species-rich ecosystems in Europe, yet they are critically endangered. Through the Katzenwedelwiese project, initiated in 2019 by artist Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, the ZKM is regenerating one of the few remaining orchards in Karlsruhe.

In 2027, in collaboration with foodculture days, we are planning a 500 km collective walk from Karlsruhe to Vevey, Switzerland, following the last remaining orchard meadows. Talking Fruits is a public gathering around this journey, bringing together experts and guests for a series of short conversations.

Drop-in Workshop: Balance with Shaun Tuck

Shaun Tuck, head of community drinks making at Company Drinks, offers a “balancing” workshop introducing the basics of drink recipe-making. Working with seasonal ingredients, participants mix their very own drinks, with acidity and sweetness asking for attention (for 16+)

This workshop is for ages 16+. Children must be accompanied by a carer.

Launch and Get-together: Gemeine Getränke with Seema Manchanda, Shaun Tuck, and Kathrin Böhm

partly in German

Together with friends, drinks and stories of the Katzenwedelwiese, Eistee Randgut will be launched. Artist Kathrin Böhm, together with Company Drinks co-directors Seema Manchanda and Shaun Tuck, will introduce the first drink in the Gemeine Getränke series, alongside the new Sammelbecher.

Using Company Drinks, a community-led drinks company based in East London, as a starting point, Kathrin developed this collective and communal drink. Orchard stewardship, fermentation and commoning informed its production.

The drink and cup become convivial tools for experiencing ecological interdependence and alternative economies. The series title Gemeine Getränke refers to Ivan Illich’s “right to commonness”. The knowledge and value gained through this collective process are reinvested in the development of the second communal drink.

Participatory Performance: Rehearsing We by Jobi

What if the next superintelligence is a room full of people who just met? Join this participatory performance to become part of a temporary collective mind.

Everyone speaks at once into their phones, the room’s thoughts instantly turn into a map of connections and contradictions. Find your intellectual nemesis, become unlikely collaborators, then get your hands on the rules and change how the whole thing works.

The performance experiments with technologies for collective power. The ambition is outrageous: to become capable of organising our lives together at a scale and complexity usually reserved for corporations and states.

Let’s rehearse what we’ve been told we could never pull off together.

Activation of Rope by Ief Spincemaille together with visitors

Let’s activate Rope! An oversized rope, hand-braided. Several people can carry it together. You can lie on it, play, sleep, and create abstract forms with it. It looks like a toy, but it is a work of art. Treat it gently. Like a book or a drawing. We will explore it together.

A walk through and around the museum with visitors carrying a 60 meter long Rope of 30 cm in diameter, creating three different shapes: a circle, line and spiral.

Discussion: The Arte Útil Archive with Alessandra Saviotti, Alistair Hudson, Gemma Medina and Tania Bruguera

Arte Útil is Spanish and can be translated as “useful art,” but it also refers to the concept of “art as a tool.” This concept is linked to the idea that art should question established systems and point out new possibilities for societal action. Arte Útil utilizes artistic thinking to create, develop, and implement tactics which enable us to reimagine and reshape the way we act in society. 
Based on an initiative of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, the Asociación de Arte Útil was founded in 2013. It is a continuously growing network of committed individuals and cultural institutions promoting the development of Arte Útil around the world. Its growing online archive brings together some 300 case studies of local initiatives from all over the globe that respond to urgent problems with concrete solutions. Discussing a recent Open Call for further case studies with a focus on technology, this discussion will dive into some of the submissions and tackle questions around how the archive itself grows a toolkit for social change.