n.n. Notes and Nodes by Felix Stalder

Kultur der Digitalität, Digital Condition, 数字状况

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Deutschsprachige Ausgabe
Kultur der Digitalität. edition suhrkamp. Berlin: Suhrkamp. 2016 (6. Auflage, 2024)

English Translation
The Digital Condition. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity Press. 2018

Chinese Translation
数字状况, published by the School of Sculpture and Public Art, China Academy of Art, 2023

Kultur der Digitalität. Die wachsende Dominanz der Algorithmizität

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ein kurzer Auscchnitt aus meinem Eintrag im Handbuch Philosophie der Digitalität, Stichwort “Kultur der Digitalität”.

“Versucht man, die „Kultur der Digitalität“ als historische Epoche über die letzten 50 Jahre als ganzes zu betrachten, lässt sich … eine deutliche Verschiebung von gemeinschaftlichen, zu referenziellen und aktuell zu algorithmischen Aspekten beobachten.

Zu Beginn – in unabhängigen Medienprojekten der 1970er- und 1980er-Jahre, wie in der frühen Netzkultur – standen gemeinschaftliche Aspekte im Vordergrund und die medialen Projekte wurden entsprechend ausgerichtet. Dies inspirierte große Hoffnungen, dass die „neuen Medien“ einen Schub der Demokratisierung mit sich bringen würden.

collapse:data.models.worlds. artists talks & discussion (Athens)

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Salvatore Vitale Death by GPS . Film Still

collapse:data.models.worlds.
artists talks & discussion

With the participation of Latent Community, Maria Mavropoulou, Felix Stalder
Moderated by Daphne Dragona, Katerina Gkoutziouli

Wednesday, 18 March, 19.00
PLYFA space, Room 7Γ

What changes in an era of possible environmental and computational collapse? How do technological solutions connect to the exhaustion of natural resources? Is it possible for infrastructural and ecological systems to sustain one another, and assist in restoring environmental and social balance?

New Site Design

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Christoph Büchel, MONTE DI PIETÀ, Fondazione Prada, 2024

New Design

I’ve redesigned my website, using a static site generator, Hugo, with the nice theme called Theme Deck, which I heavily adapted.

I’m using locally-hosted webfonts from Bunny.net, an open-source, privacy-first web font platform. And, for basic web analytics, the Hugo Umami Analytics Module, an open-source, privacy-focused web analytics tool.

Just for comparison, the old website looked like this. (slow link to archive.org)

Privacy Policy

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Rene Magritte, The Lovers II, 1928

Privacy

This site does not use 3rd party trackers.

It uses locally-hosted webfonts webfonts from Bunny.net, an open-source, privacy-first web font platform. Fully GDPR compliant.

For basic web analytics, it uses the Hugo Umami Analytics Module, an open-source, privacy-focused web analytics tool. Fully GDPR compliant.

Contact

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Contact

DM @festal@tldr.nettime.org, Signal, or email (felix AT openflows com)

collapse: data.models.worlds (Athens)

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Juan Obando, They/Them, 2023. Film Still. Courtesy of the artist.

collapse: data.models.worlds.

Group Exhibition

March 5 – April 2, 2026
Opening: Thursday, March 5, 2026, 19:00
Saigon: 39 Korytsas, 10447, Votanikos, Athens

Artists: Niki Danai Chania, Bethan Hughes, Vladan Joler/ Gordan Savičić/ Felix Stalder, Athina Koumparouli, Latent Community, Maria Mavropoulou, Juan Obando, Salvatore Vitale

Curated by Daphne Dragona, Katerina Gkoutziouli

The exhibition collapse: data.models.worlds. addresses the intensifying state of crisis shaping the contemporary world, examining the role of technology within it. Drawing on current debates around the possibilities and limitations of technological infrastructures, it explores their entanglement with social and ecological issues, from the past to the present.

From Environments to Infrastructures of Survival: The Case of the Northern Bald Ibis.

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since 2013, Northern Bald Ibises, large migratory birds, have been reintroduced into the European habitat, almost 400 years after their local extinction. What distinguishes this from other reintroduction projects is that the environment that is made available to animals live “in the wild” is not a geographically bounded site. Rather, it’s a transcontinental expanse. This necessitates a different understanding of the relationship between the work done by the reintroduction project and the environment it seeks to create.

Kommunikation ohne Subjekt (Zürich)

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Digitalität und Komplexität — Keynote: Felix Stalder

Wenn wir mit einer «Generativen Künstlichen Intelligenz», etwa einem Chatbot, interagieren, erscheint uns die Form vertraut. Zwei Subjekte, die mittels Frage und Antwort miteinander kommunizieren. So erscheint vielen Nutzer:innen die KI als ein zweites Subjekt, eine Freund:in, Expert:in oder Therapeut:in.

In dieser Präsentation werde ich darlegen, dass dieser Eindruck eine Täuschung, eine Suggestion des Interface-Designs ist. Vielmehr findet hier eine Kommunikation ohne Subjekte statt. Die Nutzer:in wird in diesen Systemen als Dividuum, als rekombinierbarer Cluster partieller Eigenschaften entworfen, während die generative KI eine situative Aktualisierung eines kollektiven Möglichkeitsraums darstellt.

From Commons to Platforms and Beyond (Berlin/Istanbul, Online)

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Online talk as part of an event connecting Berlin and Istanbul, exploring the trajectory from commons-based digital culture to platform capitalism — and what possibilities lie beyond.

The Probable and the Possible (Zurich)

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Master’s Symposium 2025
Master Fine Arts / Department Fine Arts ZHdK
October 22–23, room 5.K11

Wednesday, October 22
9:15 Welcome & Introduction
9:45–10:45 Hito Steyerl (zoom): Everything is possible (the bad news)
11:00–12:00 Eglė Kulbokaitė: Fictional Ground
12:00–13:30 Lunch break
13:30–17:00 Workshops (for MFA students only)
18:00–19:00 Sadie Plant: “Loose Ends”

Thursday, October 23
11:00–12:00 Roland Meyer
12:00–13:00 Lunch break
13:00–14:00 Agustina Woodgate
14:30–15:30 LOREM
16:00–17:00 Cemile Sahin

Compression, classification, and mimesis lie at the heart of generative AI. What are the implications of the representational regimes on which these techniques rely? How is meaning produced in such assemblages? How might AI be both an instrument and an obstacle in interrogating hegemony, violence, and extraction? What is the specific agency of art? And how are these insights used and applied in practice?

Digital Culture, Generative AI and Art (Shanghai)

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Keynote at the 10th Annual Conference on Network Society , Shanghai TANK Art Center .

Panel 4: When the Work is the Prompt

When aesthetic training, touch, and judgment are compressed into the combinatorial art of natural language, the outpouring of individual life experience and the impulse to express become mere cues that can be copied and modified. If creation becomes merely “parameter adjustment,” risk and context disappear. This discussion asks whether labor, intelligence, and craftsmanship are irreplaceable. If generative processes are viewed as teachable prompts and generative multimedia content, how does art fit in? If corpus and style are viewed as outputs automatically agreed upon by professional communities, how can the artist’s authorship and the public nature of artwork be discussed?

The Crisis of the Cybernetic Model of Reality (China Academy of Art, Hangzhou)

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Talk at the China Academy of Art , Hangzhou.

Title: The Crisis of the Cybernetic Model of Reality

Abstract: Demographic changes, global warming, and the energy transition undermine key tenets of the cybernetic model of reality, namely the notions of informatization and optimization. But instead of adapting, the race towards computational superintelligence, particularly in the US, radicalizes this model, hoping for an imaginary singularity to reaffirm and validate its principles.

But this is not the only way to think about the role of advanced technologies. Using visionary art projects, I will explore ways of rethinking our relationships with the material world as a way to address the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Digital Culture, Generative AI, and Art (ETH Zurich)

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Talk at ETH Zurich lecture series “Pandora’s Box: Large Language Models and their Impact on Society ” (10:15–12:00, Room RZ F 21).

Abstract:

If we take culture to be the sum of all activities through which societies organize meaning (to guide action), then generative AI introduces a profound transformation of (digital) culture. Initially, digital culture was shaped by the interaction of three processes: referentiality (meaning as a relation between things), communality (meaning negotiated within groups), and algorithmicity (meaning through automated selection). LLMs and other types of generative AI, on the other hand, do not use any of that. They produce what looks like cultural output through correlations only, but across a large number of variables. There is no recourse to external references, logic, or semantics. In this way, they cannot generate meaning to guide action but generate action to guide meaning. In linguistic terms, the function of language shifts from “signification” to “action”. These models, to paraphrase Donald McKenzie, are not cameras, but engines.

Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird (Visual Art)

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What is wild nature today? Here, this question is explored through a map which represents the infrastructure put in place to enable the Northern Bald Ibis to live as a wild animal again. It was created in collaboration with Vladan Joler and Gordan Savičić.

The Northern Bald Ibis (geronticus eremita) is a migratory bird with a historic habitat in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa and a rich cultural history dating back to ancient Egypt. Its current global status on the ICUN’s Red List is “endangered”.

Latent Spaces. Performing Ambiguous Data (research project)

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Latent Spaces. Performing Ambiguous Data (2021-24) was an arts-based research project on the datafied contemporary.

Our starting points are the concept of the latent space – the (technical / conceptual) realm in which different possibilities co-exist before one (or more) is then realized – and of ambiguity – the state in which different valid readings co-exist within a system of meaning.

The practice of “performing” in the project’s subtitle refers to the fact that knowledge is generated not only through critical reflection and academic publications but also through artistic interventions/creations in a wide range of media and formats

More Bio Info

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Contact

DM @festal@tldr.nettime.org, Signal, or email (felix AT openflows com)

Lists, lists, lists

Portraits, Portraits, Protraits

Covid Era Self Protrait
Analog Scan
With blue-green foam
Only one of these persons exists (among men who don’t exist (Karral et al & Nvidia 2019 and Dominik Landwehr))
Official pic from work
Ascii me

Bio for copy/pasting

Felix Stalder is a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts, teaching in the Department of Fine Arts’s “art:ifical studies” major. His work focuses on the intersection of cultural, political and technological dynamics, in particular practices of commoning, datafication, AI, and transformation of nature and of subjectivity.

React & Respond (Zurich)

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Internationale Konferenz: «React & Respond. Image Cultures under Platform Capitalism»

2–4 October 2025

Contemporary networked image cultures cannot be understood outside of platform capitalism. Today, the production, distribution and reception of visual media is largely managed and controlled by the algorithmic infrastructures, corporate policies and business models of digital platforms. At the heart of platform architectures is the quantification, evaluation and monetization of reactions – whatever we encounter online is designed to trigger our reactions, and our reaction patterns in turn drive the visual economies of platform capitalism. With algorithmically curated feeds and personalized content, what we get to see online and how we react to it is inextricably linked in ways we can often only speculate about.

Undisciplined Intelligence (Vienna) 14/20/28.09.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Technopolitics organisiert eine Reihe von Evenings zu “undisciplined intelligence”, die Emma Dowling und ich moderieren werden. Jeweils bei Future of Demonstrations, Hothouse .

Atelier Augarten
Scherzergasse 1a, 1020 Wien

Renegade Acts against Technocapitalist Authoritarianism (Vienna)

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Taking part in the opening event of the 4th edition of the festival “The Future of Demonstrations ,” under the theme “Hothouse ”.

FRI 12 SEP, 7–9 pm: Renegade Acts against Technocapitalist Authoritarianism
Atelier Augarten
Scherzergasse 1a, 1020 Wien

You probably use artificial intelligence for work and personal matters. And it’s quite likely that you have good experiences with it. In many respects, Generative AI is a game-changing technology that can make life easier.