Symposium: Costs of (Dis)Connecting (04.-05.12.2025)

Digital connections have long been sold to us as an unalloyed good: seamless, frictionless, universal. Yet the infrastructures that knit us together are also infrastructures of extraction, dispossession, and psychic attrition. To connect is to pay—with attention, with intimacy, with the disassembly of common worlds. To disconnect is likewise costly, casting individuals into isolation, precarity, or invisibility.

In this symposium, we ask: what are the costs of (dis)connecting in the digital present? How do platforms, feeds, and models organize not only what is seen but also what can be imagined? And how might artists, theorists, curators, gallerists and mediators invent gestures of resistance, refusal, or subversion in the face of these algorithmic orders?

In advance of the main symposium, the workshop day invites students to engage with the practical, performative, and critical dimensions of connectivity and disconnection in the digital present. Across five thematic workshops, artists, researchers, and facilitators will explore the infrastructures, imaginaries, and embodied practices that shape our online and offline lives. From investigating algorithmic labor and AI systems, to resisting online radicalization, to experimenting with collective intelligence, somatic resonance, and queer approaches to technology, these sessions combine hands-on experimentation with artistic strategies, reflective inquiry, and speculative methods for navigating the costs of (dis)connection. Students are encouraged to engage actively with the methods and materials, experiment with artistic and conceptual strategies, and reflect on the intersections of theory, technology, and embodiment throughout the day.