Press events, Cooperation agreements

This year's festival theme is "Future Begins," with the subtitle "Negotiating Humanity." Age of Monsters takes that theme at its word. The exhibition begins from the point at which AI and neurotechnologies have become regimes that administer the human – infrastructures that turn behaviour, affects and convictions into profiles, scores and probabilistic decision bases. The monster, the curatorial argument holds, arises not in code alone, but in the coupling of data hunger, predictive logic and displaced responsibility.

The five works over-fulfill this logic until it breaks. Visitors are not addressed as a science-centre audience, but become the material of a diagnostic practice in which every act of participation shares responsibility for the framings that emerge.

The five works

DOXA by Julius Wenk (DE) clones visitors into AI agents whose mutating personalities rewrite shared facts inside filter bubbles. A constructivist experiment in how facts become negotiable "communal truths" – and who negotiates them.

Threshold by Mariana Hurtado Carvajal (CO) reverses the logic of social media: instead of capturing attention, the work disrupts stillness. A participant who sits motionless for 90 seconds is deliberately unsettled by a reactive system drawing on camera and EEG data.

I'm always here for you by Pauline Barth (DE), Hannah Charlotte Tritt (DE) and Liliane Schuster (DE) stages two AI avatars in dialogue about relationships. As visitors come closer, they become part of the conversation – observation turns into direct address. An experimental setup on digital loneliness and the algorithmic mediation of closeness.

The Verification by Melissa Papafio-Roberts (DE) and Tabitha Reich (DE) places visitors inside an immersive VR interrogation that translates truth, morality and behaviour into a "Truth Score." A critical reflection on surveillance, social scoring and the quantification of complex human values.

EGO by Lea Baeriswyl (CH) and Conrad Lischewsky (DE) translates the audience's brain activity – via EEG, real-time visualisation and a synthetic voice — into a digital parallel presence. The self becomes a dataset, in a near future where data extraction has become the norm.

A continuous presence at international festival level

With Age of Monsters, the Communications Design programme is part of Ars Electronica – the world's most significant festival for art, technology and society – for the sixth consecutive year. In 2021 the programme staged the Ars Electronica Garden Berlin itself; since 2022 it has been represented in the Campus Exhibition in Linz five years running. Across these years, a continuous media-art exhibition practice has emerged, connecting AI, brain-computer interfaces and immersive formats.

The exhibition is curated by Prof. Andreas Ingerl, Marcel Bückner and Thomas Kemnitz. The works are produced at the School of Culture and Design at HTW Berlin, closely interwoven with Berlin's tech and media-art scene.

Age of Monsters thus names a transitional order in which the same infrastructures can function as opening or closure, as support or apparatus of control – depending on which uses prevail.

"The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears."
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Notebook 3 (XX), § 34 (trans. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith)

Studio visits possible until end of July

Until the end of July 2026, journalists are welcome to visit the team during the preparation phase and report on the works as they take shape. A summer break follows; from 6 September the team will be on site in Linz. Image material is available on request.

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Wissenschaftlicher Ansprechpartner:
Prof. Andreas Ingerl

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Weitere Informationen:
https://ars.electronica.art/negotiatinghumanity/en/
https://kd.htw-berlin.de/studium/ars-electronica