Laufende Termine

Unfinished Reality

10. April – 5. Juni 2026

Gruppenausstellung, United Art Museum, Wuhan

Well informed. Badly disposed.

15. M�rz – 24. Mai 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Galerie Eigenheim, Weimar

Well informed. Badly disposed.
Doomscrolling, Negativbias und die sozialen Herausforderungen

Ort EIGENHEIM Weimar, Asbachstraße 1, 99423 Weimar / Eröffnung 14.03.2026 um 19 Uhr mit dem DJ Set Druck – Resonanz – Kontrollverlust von Christoph Höfferl / Dauer 15.03.2025 – 25.04.2026

beteiligte Künstler*innen: Anna Bittersohl, Aram Bartholl, Simon Baumgart, Jonas Blume, Benedikt Braun, Elisa Jule Braun, Paolo Cirio, Ben Grosser, Esra Gülmen, Susanne Junker, Philipp Kummer, Marc Lee, Kayla Mattes, Signe Pierce, Theresa Rothe, Michal Schmidt, Stefan Schiek

Der Auftakt des Jahresprogramms, das sich Zuversicht, Positivität und kollektiver Lebensfreude widmet, wird durch die Ausstellung „Well informed. Badly disposed.“ markiert. Zugleich versteht sich diese erste Ausstellung als bewusste Problemanalyse: Sie benennt die Bedingungen, unter denen ein positives Jahresthema heute nicht naiv, sondern notwendig erscheint – als Haltung, um zunehmender Polarisierung, Emotionalisierung und politischer Vereinnahmung von Information etwas entgegenzusetzen.

Im Zentrum stehen die Mechanismen von Doomscrolling und Negativbias – Phänomene, die unsere Wahrnehmung, unsere Stimmung und zunehmend auch den gesellschaftlichen Diskurs prägen. Eine immersive, düster-dystopische Ausstellungskulisse definiert einen bewusst abstoßenden Raum und schafft einen von Reizüberflutung geprägten Erfahrungsrahmen, der Angst, Erschöpfung, Ekel und Abgründigkeit vermittelt. Die Ausstellung macht jene emotionale Überforderung erfahrbar, die aus der permanenten Konfrontation mit negativen Nachrichten entsteht.

Künstlerische Positionen untersuchen, wie digitale Informationsflüsse, soziale Medien und algorithmische Logiken unser Denken und Fühlen beeinflussen. Dabei wird deutlich: Plattformen sind nicht neutral. Sie spiegeln ökonomische und politische Machtverhältnisse wider, verstärken Polarisierungen und prägen demokratische Öffentlichkeiten weltweit. Zugleich zeigt sich, dass individuelle Mediennutzung eng mit Fragen von Verantwortung, Vertrauen und Bildung verknüpft ist. Die Ausstellung macht sichtbar, wie stark wir dazu neigen, das Negative stärker zu gewichten als das Positive – und wie soziale Medien und Informationsplattformen diesen Bias gezielt nutzen, um Aufmerksamkeit zu maximieren.

„Well informed. Badly disposed.“ beleuchtet bewusst die negativen Einflüsse unserer medialen Umwelt und macht zugleich neugierig auf die weiteren Ausstellungen des Jahresthemas. Sie eröffnet den notwendigen Kontrast, um die Kraft der Zuversicht in den folgenden Projekten umso stärker erfahrbar werden zu lassen. So bildet diese erste Ausstellung den kritischen Auftakt für ein Programm, das Schritt für Schritt Perspektiven auf Optimismus, Empathie und kollektive Freude entfaltet.

Moi et les autres

12. M�rz – 13. September 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Fondation EDF, Paris

By occupying nearly a third of our waking hours, screens are profoundly reshaping the contours of our relationships with others. In response, numerous journalistic and academic discourses echo concerns about the digital migration of our social lives: the idea frequently arises that the socio-technical systems at work in this migration are making us more resistant to diversity.

Our intention is to nuance this concern by acknowledging a foundational aspect of the internet—its original design to facilitate the virtuous and unprecedented emergence of communities of specific interests, often far more specialized than what our traditional offline social circles can accommodate. This utopia inevitably carries a tension between, on the one hand, the benefits of more efficient and far-reaching sociability, and on the other, the widely discussed risks of a social life limited to alters who are most similar to ourselves.

Curated by Aurélie Clémente-Ruiz, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and Camille Roth, a researcher at CNRS in social sciences.

With: Nicolas Bailleul, Aram Bartholl, Léa Belloousovitch, Neïl Beloufa, Sophie Calle, Paola Ciarska, Laurent Grasso, Juliette Green, Ben Grosser, Özgür Kar, Béatrice Lartigue, Lauren Lee MacCarthy, Katherine Longly, Randa Maroufi, Magalie Mobetie, Martine Neddam, Philippe Parreno, Françoise Pétrovitch, Valentina Peri, Marilou Poncin, Jeanne Suspuglas

Bilder

Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights

20. November 2025 – 3. Mai 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Fundacion Telefonica, Madrid

A look at how our online practices leave a trace and shape our rights. Drawing on the Charter of Digital Rights (2021), the exhibition explores seven key areas with humour and everyday examples. Framed within the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónica and Domestic Data Streamers, the show encourages reflection and debate around the safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology.

We accept cookies as if they were freshly baked biscuits, without having the slightest idea of what ingredients they contain. We share photos of our children’s birthdays or family trips as if they were WhatsApp stickers, without knowing where they might end up. We use the same password for our bank account and our grocery app (spoiler: not a good idea). We check a website to see if it’s going to rain, only to give away our data like candy on Halloween.

The exhibition Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights seeks to raise awareness about the rights and duties that citizens exercise and develop in the digital sphere. Moreover, the show invites us to keep debating and building a system of guarantees around the digital ecosystem — a kind of ethical guide that helps us understand what digital rights and duties are, what they imply, and the opportunities the technological environment offers citizens.

Framed within the initiative of the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónicatogether with the artistic collective Domestic Data Streamers — which presents six installations —, the exhibition features works by contemporary artists such as United Visual Artists, Eva & Franco Mattes, Paolo Cirio, Noemí Iglesias Barrios, Theresa Reiwer, Hasan Elahi, and Aram Bartholl, among others. Their works challenge visitors, help them understand, and encourage reflection on our actions as digital beings. A much-needed exhibition, it fuels the debate around digital rights and duties, and calls for a safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology. Because today is a good day to discuss Digital Rights.

Kommende Termine

Grand Snail Tour

10. – 11. September 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Urbane Künste Ruhr, Hattingen

The Grand Snail Tour activates public spaces in the region through artistic formats of exchange, participation, and co-production – often in collaboration with local actors. Over the course of three years, it will travel through all 53 cities in the Ruhr region. The project addresses important questions of social coexistence in an experimental and innovative way: Who owns public space and how can we create places for communal activities or activate existing spaces? What role does art play in this? The Grand Snail Tour aims to leave a variety of impressions, offer shared experiences and invite people to join the journey.

Rectangle Noir

28. Mai – 26. Juli 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Avant Galerie Vossen, Paris

Kunst Gegen Rechts

8. Mai – 7. Juni 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Mieze Südlich in der NGfZK, Gera

Self Storage

6. – 10. Mai 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Galerie Ellia, Paris

We are made of memory, but memory itself is a fiction

The exhibition Self Storage investigates how individuals construct identity through personal and intimate recollections, as well as through the technical and social systems that shape their traces. Memory is not an objective recording: it is an assemblage, a selective construction built from both forgetting and persistence. A memory emerges within a space shaped by desire, loss, and reconstruction. Self Storage foregrounds this subjective and unstable dimension of remembering. Diaries, family archives, obsolete technologies, and bodily reminiscences become raw materials to examine the materiality of memory and its capacity for reinvention.

Hard drives, clouds, online profi les, and social networks are gradually replacing notebooks and photo albums. This massive externalization questions the boundary between private memory and public exposure, between lived traces and standardized data. Self Storage extends this inquiry into a contemporary era where identity is stored, outsourced, and endlessly duplicated. Through the works assembled, the exhibition off ers a poetic and critical drift between real and invented memory, intimate and externalized. It prompts us to consider: What do we need to retain? What do we choose to forget? And what becomes of the “self” when it is reduced to archives, content, and imprints?

curation : Nicolas de Chérisey & Philippine de Salaberry in collaboration with Ellia gallery

participating artists:
Joël Andrianomearisoa, Maxime Antony, Marcella Barceló, Aram Bartholl, Federica Belli, Matthias Bitzer, Borgial, Victor Boyer, Amélie Caussade, Salomé Chatriot, Coucou Bébé, Nick Coutsier, Fleur Cozic, Paul Créange, Corentin Darré, Oli Epp, Léonor Fini, Nan Goldin, Gregor Hildebrandt, Ryoji Ikeda, Victoire Inchauspé, Éloïse Labarbe-Lafon, Octave Lauret, Louis Lekien, Inès Longevial, Keegan Luttrell, Shiva Lynn Burgos, Matisse Mesnil, Sabine Mirlesse, Polina Osipova, Louise des Places, Joséphine de Rohan-Chabot, Philippine de Salaberry, Tehotu, Egon Thuile, Thu-Van Tran, Louis Verret, Francesco Vezzoli, Rose Vidal, Xolo Cuintle, Kai Yoda, Yugnat999.

Vergangene Termine

readOn Konferenz

31. M�rz 2026

Talk, LUX Pavillon, Hochschule Mainz, Mainz

Am 31. März findet im LUX Pavillon der Hochschule Mainz die ganztägige, vierte Ausgabe der readOn Konferenz unter dem Titel AT THE EDGE OF KNOWING statt.

Die Konferenz richtet den Blick auf jene Momente, in denen Wissen brüchig wird – wenn sich zwischen Gewissheit und Vermutung, Erkenntnis und Ahnung ein offener Raum auftut. Ein Raum, der sich eindeutigen Definitionen entzieht: Fragen werden wichtiger als Antworten, Prozesse bedeutsamer als Ergebnisse – und Unsicherheit erscheint nicht als Mangel, sondern als produktive Kraft.

AT THE EDGE OF KNOWING lädt dazu ein, diese Schwelle des Verstehens bewusst zu betreten. Gemeinsam suchen wir nach neuen Perspektiven auf Gestaltung, Begegnung und das Denken möglicher Zukünfte. Nicht-Wissen wird dabei nicht umgangen, sondern als Ausgangspunkt ernst genommen.

In Vorträgen und Diskussionen untersuchen geladene Gäste, welche Rolle Unsicherheit in gestalterischen Prozessen, in der Forschung und in unserer Haltung zur Zukunft spielen kann. Die Konferenz versteht sich nicht als abgeschlossener Zustand, sondern als Reflexion eines Prozesses, der sich in die Ungewissheit hinein entfaltet – und lädt dazu ein, gemeinsam an den Rand des Wissens zu treten und die Weite des Unscharfen zu erkunden. In ungewissen Zeiten möchten wir Raum schaffen, um zusammenzukommen – und statt am scheinbar Sicheren festzuhalten, bewusst loszulassen und neu zu denken. Die Teilnahme ist gegen eine freiwillige Spende möglich.

Organisiert von den Studierenden des Masterstudiengangs Kommunikationsdesign der Hochschule Mainz.

Only cards excepted

7. – 8. Februar 2026

Gruppenausstellung, Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, Bentheim

Bring Your Phone!: TOUCH FARM

16. Januar 2026

Curatorial, panke.gallery, Berlin

🤳🏾Bring Your Phone! : TOUCH FARM 🌾👩‍🌾 reclaims the idea of the farm for the screen age. If farming once organized land, labor, and life, today it organizes attention and clout. TOUCH FARM takes the architecture of click farms and flips it from extraction to participation.

Bring your phone. Exhibit your work. Everyone participates.
🐷🐐🐰🐖🐴🐑🐓🐖🐔🐮🐇🌾🚜👩‍🌾
Curated by @arambartholl & @socratesstamatatos.

🎉 #Vorspiel 2026 Opening Party at @panke.gallery

📍panke.gallery, Friday, 16 January 2026 at 7 PM (Gerichtstr. 23, Hof 5, 13347 Berlin)

Spazi di Transizione

9. – 11. Dezember 2025

Talk, Spazio Murat, Bari

← alle Termine

Blog Archiv für Schlagwort: keepalive

Keepalive in german press

Oktober 17, 2016

http://www.haz.de/Nachrichten/Der-Norden/Uebersicht/Ein-Stein-mitten-im-Wald-in-der-Lueneburger-Heide-ist-ein-WLAN-Hotspot

http://www.mopo.de/news/panorama/bizarres-kunstprojekt-dieser-felsbrocken-gibt-ueber-wlan-ueberlebens-tipps-24841340

After a recent visit by a DPA reporter at Springhornhof museum, Neuenkirchen a series of articles about „Keepalive“ came out in Germany.
More:

Tags:keepalive + springhornhof

DOMENICO QUARANTA: Oh, When the Internet Breaks at Some Point

Mai 15, 2016

An essay by Domenico Quaranta about the piece Keepalive recently published on mefsite.wordpress.com – MEDIA IN THE EXPANDED FIELD, A collaborative platform for the participants in the think tank ‚Media in the Expanded Field‘, curated by Montabonel & Partners.
THX!!

DOMENICO QUARANTA: Oh, When the Internet Breaks at Some Point

May 12, 2016 mefsite.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/domenico-quaranta-oh-when-the-internet-breaks-at-some-point/

keepalive-neuenkirchen-aram-bartholl-05-1000
“Walked out this morning / Don’t believe what I saw / A hundred billion bottles / Washed up on the shore / Seems I’m not alone at being alone / A hundred billion castaways / Looking for a home” The Police, “Message in a Bottle”, 1979
Back in October 2010, German artist Aram Bartholl cemented 5 USB flash drives in various locations in New York, as part of an Eyebeam residency. [1] Referring to the way, in espionage, items are passed between two individuals using a secret location and without an actual meeting, he called the project Dead Drops. The first five dead drops were empty, except for a small readme file explaining the project. A dedicated website was set up, featuring a video tutorial and a simple “how to” and inviting people to participate in the project.

In interviews, Bartholl explained that at the beginning he was just fascinated by the power of an image: a small data container plugged in the wall, in public space, and a person trying to access it with her own device. He invited people to participate by dropping files in and taking files out, installing their own dead drop and sending the GPS coordinates to Bartholl. As in many collaborative projects, he wasn’t particularly confident about people’s participation, and he believed that the project was conceptually strong enough even in the shape of a small, five-nodes network. But people liked the idea, and as I’m typing on my keyboard today, the online database features almost 1500 registered dead drops for a total storage space of 9891 gigabytes. I installed my own a while ago and I’ve noticed some others along the years, and I’ve always been fascinated by the precariousness of these tiny, rusty artifacts. I’ve never seen anybody plugging in, and probably most of them are almost empty, or out of work. But they are, still, extremely powerful as an image.

Message in a Bottle
“A Dead Drop is a naked piece of passively powered Universal Serial Bus technology embedded into the city, the only true public space. In an era of growing clouds and fancy new devices without access to local files we need to rethink the freedom and distribution of data. The Dead Drops movement is on its way for change! Free your data to the public domain in cement! Make your own Dead Drop now! Un-cloud your files today!!!” Aram Bartholl, “The Dead Drops Manifesto”, 2010 [2]
The dead drops network emerged in an age that saw a major shift in the general perception of the internet as a public space. Widespread Wi-Fi access, the massive adoption of social networking sites, and the advent of smartphones made people start to think about the internet as a new public space, with no physical boundaries and infrastructure, where data can be shared and taken easily and seamlessly. The metaphor of the cloud, already used in the Nineties to describe the internet, became more and more popular in the late 2000s, when cloud computing emerged – further reinforcing the idea of an immaterial public space and eroding the difference between public and private, local and shared. As Annet Dekker wrote in 2008:
……
READ ON FULL ESSAY HERE
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Tags:keepalive

Keepalive

August 26, 2015

Full project page here!! –> http://www.datenform.de/keepalive-eng.html

Keepalive
Aram Bartholl 2015
permanent outdoor installation
material: rock, steel, router, usb-key, thermoelectric generator, fire, software, PDF database
size: 100 x 110 x 90 cm
at Landart Kunstverein Springhornhof Neuenkirchen, Niedersachsen, Germany
commissioned by Center for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University Lüneburg
curated by Andreas Broeckmann, Leuphana Arts Program
inauguration: Sunday, August 30, 2015, 11:00 am at Springhornhof
The boulder from the region Neuenkirchen, Niedersachsen contains a thermoelectric generator which converts heat directly into electricity. Visitors are invited to make a fire next to the boulder to power up the wifi router in the stone which then reveals a large collection of PDF survival guides. The piratebox.cc inspired router which is NOT connected to the Internet offers the users to download the guides and upload any content they like to the stone database . As long as the fire produces enough heat the router will stay switched on. The title Keepalive refers to a technical network condition where two network endpoints send each other ‚empty‘ keepalive messages to maintain the connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keepalive To visit the piece please arrange an appointment with Springhornhof.de.
The project „Keepalive“ by Aram Bartholl was realised in the context of the research project „Art and Civic Media“, as part of the Innovation Incubator Lüneburg, a large EU project funded by the European Fund for Regional Development and the Germna State of Lower Saxony.

Press
http://hyperallergic.com/231483/fire-up-a-wifi-router-hidden-inside-a-rock/
Official Invitation (german)
http://springhornhof.de/aram-bartholl-keepalive/
Pictures
https://www.flickr.com/photos/bartholl/sets/72157655953293283

__________________________________________________________________
You are warmly invited to the Keepalive opening on Sunday, 30th of August 2015
11.00 a.m. Meeting point at Kunstverein Springhornhof
Leave for Hartböhn by car (approx. 10 min) or by bicycle (approx. 20 min, rental bikes are available)
11.30 a.m.
Greeting: Prof. Dr. Martin Warnke (Chair of Art Association)
In discussion: Andreas Broeckmann (Leuphana Arts Program) & Aram Bartholl
Afterwards
Food, drinks and data sharing at the campfire
__________________________________________________________________
“Keepalive” by Aram Bartholl (*1972 in Bremen) looks just like a normal rock from the outside. There is no sign that the stone, which lies inconspicuously in Lüneburger Heide on the edge of idyllic Hartböhn, contains hundreds of digital books. An internal thermoelectric generator and WiFi router must be activated by a lighting a fire under the rock before an electronic survival guide library can be accessed. Data and text can also be added by smartphone or laptop.
Media artist Aram Bartholl works with paths of knowledge and information communication that work against the developments of the digital age and question our handling of data. In this and other projects, he undermines power structures and control mechanisms in the use of internet services and data transmission, mostly through the introduction of a random, uncontrollable element.
In “Keepalive” the stone itself becomes the data medium. In a very archaic, but at the same time clandestine manner, information can be exchanged only locally — in contrast to networked servers, services and clouds worldwide, this rock is not connected to the internet. You have to get close to nature in the countryside, find the stone and make a fire to activate the data source. Anyone can do it once they have found out the exact location of the stone from either the nearby Kunstverein Springhornhof or another source.
Following the advice in the survival guides prepares you — this is the promise at least — for solo survival in the chaotic world of computer programming as much as for solo survival in the wilderness. “Keepalive” examines what “survival” really means and sounds out our true needs. The work resists the centralising forces of the Internet, raises questions about the democracy of knowledge management and ignites an autonomy backlash.” (Jennifer Bork)
__________________________________________________________________
The “Keepalive” project by Aram Bartholl was created in conjunction with the research project “Art and Civic Media” as part of Innovations-Inkubators Lüneburg, a major EU project supported by the European Regional Development Fund and the State of Lower Saxony.

Tags:fire + keepalive + landart + leuphana + piratebox + rock + springhornhof