- How does working with artificial intelligence influence creative processes?
- What power structures are perpetuated by digital technologies?
- Under what conditions do we create and maintain identities in the digital space?
- How do we as artists and designers deal with digital forms of surveillance, censorship and discrimination?
- How can digital forms of interconnectedness be cultivated in work processes and thematized in artistic and creative practices?
- Acquisition of technological, artistic, critical and communicative skills in the field of digitality
- Assistance with self-organization, networking and strengthening one's own autonomy
- Learning how to use and experiment with different digital tools
- Support with the production of digital portfolios
Programme
Cluster III – Becoming Public(s)
This cluster explores digital and analog publics as well as the practices of sharing, publishing, and becoming visible in artistic practice. The focus is on critical questions of self-representation, strategic visibility, and the complex relationships between digital spaces, public places, and structural power relations.Subject areas: Public Spheres, Digital Self-Representation, Participation, Professionalization, Algorithmic Logics, and Attention Dynamics
Cluster II – Costs of (Dis)Connecting
This cluster examines the political and social costs of digital connections. It questions the apparent neutrality of digital platforms and discusses their embedded power structures. Students are invited to view social media, digital platforms, and the virtual space in general not only as spaces of consumption, but also as terrains for artistic interventions and critical analysis.Subject areas: Social Media Dynamics, Online Identities, Connections in the Digital Space, and Digital Infrastructures
Cluster I – Worlds That Build The(y) Self
This cluster explores the artistic and theoretical possibilities of digital realities. It is about the creation of alternative worlds that represent not only narrative, but also political and social counter-designs. Digital technologies are seen as tools and actors that help shape creative processes and open up new aesthetic and discursive spaces. The critical examination of the ideologies and power mechanisms behind digital systems - especially generative AI and game worlds - is a central component.Subject areas: Generative AI, World Building, Games, Digital Tools, and Critical Interventions
Formats
Symposium: Costs of (Dis)Connecting
04.-05. December 2025, HGB Leipzig & Halle 14
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. In this symposium, we ask: what are the costs of (dis)connecting in the digital present?
Introductory Workshops for HGB students: Lenn Blaschke & Caspar Weimann,
Nicolas Gourault, Aleks Berditchevskaia and Cait Fisher
Full-day program consisting of lectures, talks, a workshop and performances with Günseli Yalçınkaya, Shumon Basar, Orhun Mersin & Yağmur Uçkunkaya, Shusha Niederberger & Heiko Schmid, Franziska von Hasselbach and Mark Mushiva
Evening Lectures
In the evening lecture series, international positions present their practices in lectures and lecture performances. In doing so, they open up a forum for exchange on practices that deal with digitality in different conceptual, methodological and artistic-creative ways.
SOUND LAB is an open format workshop that explores digital sound montage, live looping and DJing as embodied, performative artistic practices.
Participants will engage hands-on with professional DJ setups, loop stations, field recordings and audio effects, investigating rhythm, texture and spatial listening. The three-day workshop will culminate in a public performance of selected sonic works.
The lab invites students to develop their own audio practices at the intersection of sound art, improvisation, and expanded performance.
Through video works employing diverse artistic strategies, participants will gain access to: 3D modelling, virtual reality and immersive environments.
The seminar encourages critical reflection on the politics of representation and storytelling beyond linear time.
AURORA DIGITALIS Screening Series
Aurora Digitalis is an educational screening format dedicated to time-based digital films that create alternative worlds with game engines, among other tools, and renegotiate these worlds in their identities, virtual bodies and socio-economic structures. Through speculative narrative forms, the understanding of game mechanics and avatars, they question the ideological foundations of digital technologies and open up critical perspectives on power structures and future concepts. The screening includes films from international positions as well as HGB alumni.
Aurora Digitalis is an extension of the weekly HGB cinema Aurora. Initiated as part of (Un)Learning Digitalities with Clemens von Wedemeyer (Expanded Cinema class) and Eliza Goldox (Artistic Associate) of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig in cooperation with the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.
