UN_CTRL – Festival for Convivial Technologies and Arts

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.

11:00–14:00

and

15:00–17:00

Drop-in Workshop: Un_ctrl Your Device – A Tech Break with Chindōgu
partly in German

Chindōgu, literally meaning “strange tool,” refers to absurd inventions that solve a problem while making their intended function as impractical as possible. In the spirit of UN_CTRL, this workshop invites participants to rethink technology by tinkering with everyday devices they bring along, modifying and sabotaging them with imagination and humour.

What if our smartphones stopped us from scrolling, or our devices encouraged us to talk to each other more? Together, we will question our relationship with technology and explore absurd ways of using it differently. Does technology always have to become more efficient, or can it also help us become more independent and connect with one another?

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! 

Discussion: Emancipatory Cybernetics (working title)

Tiara Roxanne & David Muñoz-Alcántara, moderated by Fabian Saavedra Lara

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.

Drop-in Workshop: Reciclajes — The PET Commons

Reciclajes - The PET Commons adopts Francesco Mariotti’s hybrid-garden practice into an open, replicable method for communities. By transforming discarded PET bottles into sparkling „quantum meadows,“ the workshop explores how plastic waste can be transformed into ecological awareness and repair. It invites participants to see value in use, participation and transmission rather than ownership.

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! 

Perfomative Talk Oops, I’m Scrolling Again by Yasha Jain and 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.

Conversation and presentation: 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: BANKANGA INTERTROPICAL: Protocol Activation: A Participatory Laboratory on Reciprocal Infra·Structures and Decentralized Exchange (working title) by Jose Pablo Garcia Sossa (limited group sign-up to be announced)

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.

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.

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.

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

in German

Around a large table, 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.

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.