Swan Presence

A swan obsessed with Obsolete Presence. Picture by Simon Fischer: CC BY 2.0
Seasons of Mediaarts, ZKM Karlsruhe 2020
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.
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
GOGBOT 2025
SCROLL PANIC REPEAT
18-21 september @ ENSCHEDE
festival for art music technology
Fundraiser event I participated in:
„Join us on Saturday, September 13, 2025, 13–20h at Engeldamm 64, 10179 Berlin (Kreuzberg).
Solidarity Fundraiser for the
Gaza Biennale –- Berlin Pavilion
Works by 100+ Berlin artists
Each work €50
Over 120 Berlin-based artists have already donated works on paper in solidarity with colleagues in Palestine. The fundraiser will make the Berlin Pavilion possible: It will support the participating artists in Gaza by paying them artist fees, reproducing works that cannot leave Gaza under the siege, and expanding the ecosystem of the Biennale that allows the public to engage with their work.
If you are a Berlin-based artist and would like to contribute works on paper to the fundraiser, please email fundraising@gazabiennaleberlin.com for more information.“
Join us live-in-studio with season two of the Radio Spaetkauf x Europäische Akademie Berlin podcast collaboration. This year we focus on CULTURE. Each episode features fresh voices and perspectives representing a wide array of backgrounds, expertise and disciplines. Host Daniel Stern is joined by researchers, academics, independent artists, journalists and community leaders with unique insights into our evolving cultural interactions.
September 13th: Museums are more than just buildings that house objects. They are sites of memory, meaning, and power – spaces where stories are told, preserved, and sometimes contested. But who decides what’s worth keeping? And how do museums evolve in response to the cultures and technologies of their time?
As boundaries blur between archive and activism, exhibition and experience, we ask: What is a museum today? And what should it be? Together we explore the shifting roles of museums in shaping public understanding, identity, and imagination.
Guests include:
Michael Soltau – Synthesizer Museum Berlin
Aram Bartholl – Media and concept artist
Lilja-Ruben Vowe – PhD in cultural history, curator and inclusive mediator
Dr. Wenke Wegner – Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation
Host: Dan Stern
The festival brings artistic short films into public space – presented in a mobile, seemingly improvised exhibition object: a transport cart with pneumatic tires, stacked with various boxes, crates and bags, all secured with colorful tension straps. Through peepholes in these containers, passersby can watch the films on hidden tablets or smartphones. The route leads through five locations in the district (Goslaer Platz, Mierendorffplatz, Österreichpark, Schustehruspark, Lietzenseepark). At each stop, the “mini-museum” stays for about one hour. The project is accompanied throughout the day by the two artists and curators Marian Luft and Moritz Frei, who will be present to assist and engage with the audience.
Curated by Marian Luft & Moritz Frei
With:
Iván Argote, Sophia Süßmilch, Björn Melhus, Hansol Kim, Barış Çavuşoğlu, Lorna Mills, Andrew Birk, Peng Li

A swan obsessed with Obsolete Presence. Picture by Simon Fischer: CC BY 2.0
Seasons of Mediaarts, ZKM Karlsruhe 2020
I m very pleased to announce that my work Obsolete Presence, currently on view at ZKM Karlsruhe has finally made it to the stock photo website Shutterstock. This is in particular interesting because I’ve been working with watermarked stock photo since a few years now. The circle has finally closed. :))
All pics tagged with Bartholl on Shutterstock here.

*MARIMBA MIX* release PARTY!!
New MIX by Selector NUTTENDORF
Thursday Sept.21, 18:00 – 20:00, Afterwork-Sunset-Party!
Location Outdoor! Humboldthafen, Berlin -> HERE!
MARIMBA MIX is the finest Collection of Songs based on the pre-installed iphone ringtone, worlds most famous ringtone now a days, selected by Selektor NUTTENDORF. The Marimba ringtones‘ origin is based on a percussion instrument called Marimba, similar to a Xylophon. It is the national instrument of Guatemala. MARIMBA MIX is developed in the Presence of Aram Bartholl’s artwork ‚Obsolet Presence‘ as seen in the cover. The art piece was installed @Humboldthafen in Berlin for one month in September 2017. The MARIMBA MIX released on the 21.09.2017 as an irl CD.
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UPDATE:
The party was a great success!! The mix is for DOWNLOAD available at http://nadjabuttendorf.com/marimba-mix/






Obsolete Presence
at Festival of Futurenows, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
14. – 17.9.2017
After the install at Möhnesee Obsolete Presence is currently shown in Berlin during the Futurenows festival. It is setup right next to Hauptbahnhof (central station) at the Humboldthafen. The piece will be up till October 10th.
Credits: Wasser- und Kulturbau GmbH Hönow, Thx!



New piece I made for the group show „Odyssey“ at Möhnesee. http://odyssey.to/