(Un)Learning Digitalities

What influence do new digital technologies have on artistic and design practice? How can digital media be critically examined and used in a purposeful way? The program has been working on these and other questions since October 2024 and is developing a wide range of artistic educational formats on the use and application of digital media until the end of 2026. Together with HGB lecturers, students, artists, designers and scientists, it is designing and implementing transdisciplinary formats such as lectures, practical workshops, seminars, interventions, a symposium, online platforms and a publication. The program is cross-disciplinary and is aimed at HGB students as well as the interested public. The program is characterized by an experimental and collaborative approach as well as the processual development of sustainable teaching formats.

Through a collaborative examination of current digitality discourses, new networks are created and critical reflection on digital media is encouraged. The program supports artists and designers—with a focus on the FLINTA* group, which has so far been underrepresented in the technological field—in their entry into increasingly digitalized working contexts.

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

AURORA DIGITALIS

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.