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.
Questions of the program
- 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?
Opportunities for students
- 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
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.
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
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.
Labs, Workshops and Seminars
Sonic Kinships – Sonicities of (Dis)Entanglement with Anna Schimkat
In collaboration with SoundArtLab, the workshop focuses on voice in resonance and space. Anna Schimkat, a visual artist, explores sound art through installations and performances. Using self-made instruments and field recordings, she creates spaces that sharpen perception and invite interaction.
Sound-Reactive Visuals in TouchDesigner with Ksenia (Sova) Bashmakova
Participants can get familiar with the fundamentals of TouchDesigner, with a focus on creating visuals that respond dynamically to sound. Bashmakova uses a generative electronic music approach and narrative live video essay to talk about queer representation in digital space, with a particular interest in alienation, isolation, and anxiety in personal communication.
Glitched Materialities
Enorê is coming to the HGB for Clay Printing Week! Enorê works primarily with 3D-printed ceramics and uses clay as a catalyst to explore how digital data can be conveyed through physical processes. The focus is on the materials' ability to absorb, erode, and reconfigure shapes. In cooperation with Digital Materialities (Prof. Mitra Wakil / Prof. Fabian Hesse).
AI owned by no-one
Hands on Open Source AI - Workshop with Niels Gercama: This workshop offers a practical introduction to creating images and videos with ComfyUI and AnimateDiff and shows how open source AI tools can be flexibly combined. The aim is to build a basic understanding of open source AI and to acquire the skills to develop simple workflows independently. In cooperation with Digital Materialities (Prof. Mitra Wakil / Prof. Fabian Hesse).
Sound Lab with Patrice Lipeb and Banu Çiçek Tülü
Exploring digital sound editing as an artistic practice: The lab invites students to develop their own audio practices at the intersection of sound art, improvisation, and expanded performance. Participants work with DJ setups, loop stations, field recordings, and audio effects at the intersection of sound art, improvisation, and expanded performance.
Digital Reenactment as Artistic Strategy
In this seminar, the artist duo HUNITI GOLDOX invites participants to explore digital reenactment as a tool for reinterpreting historical events, myths, material transformations, and erased narratives.
Liquid Coding
Liquid Coding is a self-organized coding space at the HGB that enables collaborative and reflective engagement with programming practices. In an open co-learning studio setting, it offers opportunities to deepen technical knowledge and critically discuss the political and social implications of coding. The sessions are accessible to all levels of experience.
FLINTA* Hacking Circle
The idea of coming together in order to learn more about coding as beginners sparked from a Permacomputing workshop, where we explored how minimal hardware and open-source systems can enable sustainable, cost-efficient, and creative approaches to computation. There are no skills required to join our group!
GameJam with Dimitri Alexandre
The intro for this session explores the world of GameJams, based on a collaboratively created game in the frame of the Festival Octobre Numérique. We discuss the tools, constraints, and creative process involved in building a game in just 48 hours.
Invitation Writing Club by Sohyeon Lee
What we do? We each write and publish our own website invitations. Who are we? Students who want to begin their code writing, who already write code, who want to write code with friends, who are interested in self-publishing and more!
Student Led Sessions
Permacomputing Aesthetics and PostMarketOS with Chaline Bang & Martynus Jekentaite
A workshop that explores Permacomputing, its aesthetics and repair culture by self-hosting servers through repurposing obsolete smartphones. With technical guidance and conceptual framing, participants will develop practical skills to install an open-source operating system (PostMarketOS) and self-host their applications with Nginx.
GAME LAB with Tobias Kurpat
The Game Lab offers a hands-on introduction to the creation of immersive worlds. Over the course of four two-day modules, students will learn to use tools such as Polycam (a 3D scanning app) and the Unity development platform, exploring how these can be integrated into their own artistic practice. The focus lies on the conceptualization and realization of narrative environments and on examining interactivity as a form of artistic expression.
Data Rescue Project with Anne Chpakovski and Merlin Rainer
In the ‘Data Rescue Project’ workshop, we want to ‘back up’ data that we consider valuable from a personal, historical or social perspective in analogue form. We create experimental analogue animations using these tools and techniques: Drawing, Collage, After Effects and Reaper. All of the participants’ work is compiled into a collective piece and exhibited at an opening event at Lichthof.
Reading Group
Reading Group is an open, student-led format that focuses on collective knowledge production and critical engagement with digital transformation. In each session, different students present texts, books, and materials, which are then read, discussed, and critically examined together.
Spiritual Technologies: From 1920s Naples to the Pokéverse
Session hosted by Mio Al-Hashimy
This reading session is proposing is to examine alternative models of what counts as “technology,” the kinds of worlds such technologies open up, and the ways subjects position themselves in relation to the processes of objectification and domestication that such technologies entail.
This reading session is proposing is to examine alternative models of what counts as “technology,” the kinds of worlds such technologies open up, and the ways subjects position themselves in relation to the processes of objectification and domestication that such technologies entail.
"Disordered Attention - How We Look at Art and Performance Today" by Claire Bishop
Session with Performative Arts Class
How technology and the attention economy shape contemporary art and performance: The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking.
How technology and the attention economy shape contemporary art and performance: The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking.
„Culture and Technics" (1965) by Gilbert Simondon
Session hosted by Dunja Rahovsky Šuligoj
Simondon addresses his concern with the oppositional way in which technics are regarded in relation to culture. He sees the separation between the two as the cause of human’s inability to develop a more integrated relationship with its material and technical environment. The aim of the collective reading is to consider the text in relation to the technics of the present.
Simondon addresses his concern with the oppositional way in which technics are regarded in relation to culture. He sees the separation between the two as the cause of human’s inability to develop a more integrated relationship with its material and technical environment. The aim of the collective reading is to consider the text in relation to the technics of the present.
„Critical Play" by Mary Flanagan
Session with Tobias Kurpat
Building on Mary Flanagan’s concept of “Critical Play,” we analyze games and platforms as malleable systems that can challenge social norms through intentionally crafted, radical design. We contrast this potential with the darker side of these mechanisms: the gamification of politics and everyday life, which contributes to democratic regression.
Building on Mary Flanagan’s concept of “Critical Play,” we analyze games and platforms as malleable systems that can challenge social norms through intentionally crafted, radical design. We contrast this potential with the darker side of these mechanisms: the gamification of politics and everyday life, which contributes to democratic regression.
“Xenofeminist Manifesto - A Politics of Alienation” by Laboria Cuboniks and “Xenofeminism” by Helen Hester
Session hosted by Moritz Jekat
This reading group explores how feminist, techno-political, and emancipatory thought can be rethought under conditions of digital acceleration and translated into artistic practice. Today, Xenofeminism appears less as a closed theory than as an interface—one that must connect with other theories of power, (re)production, and infrastructure to become politically effective.
This reading group explores how feminist, techno-political, and emancipatory thought can be rethought under conditions of digital acceleration and translated into artistic practice. Today, Xenofeminism appears less as a closed theory than as an interface—one that must connect with other theories of power, (re)production, and infrastructure to become politically effective.
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
Alumni Talks
The Alumni Talk series is a forum with HGB alumni, particularly FLINTA*, for exchanging ideas on the use and reflection of digital media in artistic practice, as well as strategies for professional development.
Charlotte Eifler
Charlotte Eifler is an artist and filmmaker whose practice explores the politics of representation in relation to technology. Working across moving image, extended reality (XR), installation, and performance, her work engages with digital infrastructures, archival practices, and queer speculative futures.
Vanessa Amoah Opoku
Vanessa Amoah Opoku is a German-Ghanaian interdisciplinary artist investigating technologies of diaspora through immersive installations that create hybrid physical-digital spaces. Using touch-based methodologies including LiDAR scanning and varied materialities, she examines both diasporic technologies and how imperial tools are transformed through diasporic use.
Paula Ábalos
Paula Ábalos (*1989, Santiago de Chile) is a visual artist based in Leipzig, Germany. Her practice unfolds primarily in the field of experimental video, in dialogue with other media. She is particularly interested in the relationship between work and sleep, and in the ways these concepts intersect and resonate today.
Aurora Digitalis Screenings
This screening series focuses on time-based digital works that use game engines and other tools to create alternative worlds, renegotiating these worlds in terms of their identities, virtual bodies, and socio-economic structures, while also questioning the ideological foundations of digital technologies. Aurora Digitalis is an extension of the weekly HGB cinema Aurora and is organized by Clemens von Wedemeyer (Expanded Cinema class) in cooperation with the Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig.
Collaborations
Leipzig Book Fair: ALUCINATIONS - Artistic Re-Appropriations of AI
Lecture Performance with Tobias Kurpat, Mio Al-Hashimy, Sijo Choi Kim, Sun Zhengke and Jiayi Li
As part of the Leipzig Book Fair of Forum KI&Mensch, (Un)learning Digitalities brings together artistic positions by students that do not view AI as a neutral tool, but rather as a hallucination, a resistant system, an instrument for re-narration and re-historicization, a metaphor, and a humanized system. The artists use AI specifically to generate alternative narratives, reorder collective and individual memories, and critically question existing power structures as well as normative and historical narratives.
As part of the Leipzig Book Fair of Forum KI&Mensch, (Un)learning Digitalities brings together artistic positions by students that do not view AI as a neutral tool, but rather as a hallucination, a resistant system, an instrument for re-narration and re-historicization, a metaphor, and a humanized system. The artists use AI specifically to generate alternative narratives, reorder collective and individual memories, and critically question existing power structures as well as normative and historical narratives.
The project is co-financed by the European Union and is co-funded by public funds on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon state parliament.