with Lenn Blaschke and Caspar Weimann (in German)
Workshop schedule: 10am – 7pm
Hosted by Klasse künstlerisches Handeln und Forschen (KHuF) | Prof. Christin Lahr & Sven Bergelt
After short keynote speeches by Lenn Blaschke and Caspar Weimann in the morning, common questions will be developed and the participants will be divided into two workshops: Red or blue pill?
RED PILL <> BLUE PILL
Inspired by motifs from the film "The Matrix," right-wing, antifeminist, and masculinist networks are structuring radicalization processes as immersive experiences, which will be explored in two workshops. Since radicalization processes can affect anyone quite randomly, we will also draw lots to determine which pill you take.
Morpheus to Neo: „Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image. It is the mental projection of your digital self.“ … „What is real? How do you define real? If you are talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know.“
BLUE PILL, Workshop with Lenn Blaschke | Room 2.05
Lenn Blaschke will guide you through the process of taking the blue pill, which will help you define your own position: Am I radical? What room for maneuver do I have within my immersion? You will create media artifacts, map your digital bubbles, develop mini-scenarios with algorithmic characters, explore your agency, and reflect through poetic impulses.
RED PILL, Workshop with Caspar Weimann | Room 2.10 (3DXR Digital Materialities Workshop)
Caspar Weimann will guide you through the process of taking the red pill, which will lead you into various radicalization processes and allow you to trace their development. You will discover how social media platforms are misused by right-wing networks as tools for orchestrated radicalization and what artistic strategies can be used to counteract this online intervention.
Feedback und Diskussion | MEET & EAT | Raum 2.05
At the end, we will come together again to share insights and experiences from the workshops and explore possible strategies. The event concludes with spoon comments and conversations that go beyond the plate over a bowl of hot soup.
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. Neo: What truth? Spoon boy: There is no spoon. Neo: There is no spoon? Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
Lenn Blaschke, interdisciplinary media artist, Berlin
Co-founder of THIS IS FAKE (media art collective for virtual and augmented reality), founder of Little Brother e.V., member of Radikale Töchter. Since 2024, artistic assistant at the Institute for Democratic Culture (idk) for the IELKE VR project. Focus: installations, games, virtual realities, metaverse.
Caspar Weimann, artist, Düsseldorf
Honorary professor and mentor for acting at ADK Baden-Württemberg with a focus on expanding the understanding of acting, post-digital and hybrid theater strategies, participatory theater on the internet, and the theatricality of social media; Initiator of onlinetheater.live, the “Myke” project (re:publica 2025), the “Loulu” app, among others. Focus areas: right-wing and anti-feminist online radicalization, radicalization synergies, criticism of masculinity, queer empowerment.
>>> Registration till 28th of November: Email to bergelt@hgb-leipzig.de
Workshop schedule: 11am – 5pm
Hosted by Expanded Cinema Class | Prof. Clemens von Wedemeyer
The workshop will take a hybrid approach, both theoretical and practical. In the morning, through the discussion of a few artworks depicting the process of training AI models, we'll think about the potential and caveats of exploring and exposing hidden digital labor. In the afternoon, we'll jump to a hands-on approach of ComfyUI to experiment with some workflows for generating visuals using various machine learning techniques.
Screening 6:30pm with the following films:
VO (2020)
A deadly accident between a self-driving car and a pedestrian sets off an investigation about the role of human workers in the training of driverless cars. Testimonies from vehicle operators guide us through a night shift where the landscape merges with data from the car’s sensors.
Their Eyes (2025)
How does a machine learn to read the world? Testimonies and screen recordings introduce the experience of online micro-workers from the Global South: their job is to teach the AI of self-driving cars to navigate the streets of the Global North. As they investigate the images they receive from the US, they imagine micro-strategies in order to organize and hack back the system exploiting their hands and eyes.
Nicolas Gourault is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris (FR) with a background in visual arts and visual studies. He has worked with Forensic Architecture before graduating from Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts.
His work is imbued with this double training, navigating between online open-source investigations and the critical use of new media as documentary tools. His films and video installations explore the power relationships embedded in technologies and tries to build counter-narratives through the use of situated testimony and experimental image-making.
His artworks have been exhibited in contemporary art venues such as Centre Pompidou (FR), the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (DE), Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) (DE), Ars Electronica (AT), Gnration (PT), la Cité internationale des arts (FR), LOOP Barcelona video art fair (ES) and le musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (FR), but also in film festivals such as Berlinale (DE), Cinéma du Réel (FR), Hot Docs (CA), Sheffield Doc|Fest (UK), Festival Nouveaux Cinéma (CA), Festival dei Popoli (IT), IndieLisboa (PT), E Tudo Verdade (BR), Punto de Vista (ESP).
>>> Registration till 28th of November: Email to goldox@hgb-leipzig.de & sun@hgb-leipzig.de
Workshop schedule: 10am - 6pm
Hosted by Media Art Class | Prof. Stine Marie Jacobsen & Prof. Eli Cortiñas
Discover how to harness Collective Intelligence (CI) to advance your individual artistic and research practice. This workshop is a crash course for art students on the core participatory methods and digital tools that can help you tap into the power of collective intelligence. We'll dissect compelling case studies from the arts and related fields, demo open-source tools that enable mass collaboration and crowdsourcing, and explore using Nesta's CI Playbook to create your own collaborative project. You'll leave equipped with the foundational frameworks and practical understanding of how to transform artistic practice through collective intelligence and digital interconnectedness.
Aleks Berditchevskaia is the Insights and Engagement Lead and Co-founder of Nesta's Centre for Collective Intelligence Design. Collective intelligence design is the art and science of bringing together people, data and technology to enable groups to achieve more than the sum of their parts. Her expertise spans a range of participatory research methods including citizen science, crowdsourcing, digital democracy. In 2021 she led a partnership with the International Federation of the Red Cross to prototype new tools for crisis response that combine the intelligence of frontline communities and AI, using a participatory design approach. She has also worked on creative public participation projects with partners ranging from local government (The Strategy Room) to the BBC (Crowd predictions) and trained teams from the UN Development Programme's Accelerator Lab Network to the Glasgow School of Arts apply collective intelligence methods in their work.
She is also an expert in applied participatory futures and has pioneered the participatory AI methodology which brings community and public voices into the design of emerging AI systems. She has collaborated with communities, designers, artists, technologists on developing participatory, creative and speculative design methods to explore different ways that and the ways that AI can help to enhance human collective intelligence (see e.g. Future of Minds and Machines, Minds and Machines and Civic AI). She is currently leading the design and delivery of a national participatory AI programme which involves public voices in the oversight and governance of AI technology by the government and public agencies in the UK.
>>> Closed workshop
Workshop schedule: 10:30am-4:30pm | Hosted by Class for performative Arts | Anna Zett
The body is not only the oldest medium of communication within both evolution and our own lives, it is also primary in that it continues to form the foundation for every form of social connection – whether physical, digital, or imaginary. Digitalization, economic isolation, and the destruction of local structures in favor of imperial structures seem to increasingly alienate us from the embodied experience of social connection. Somatic activism is one way of responding to this development. The work of Cait Fisher, a former professional athlete from the USA who in the last 10 years has been active in Berlin in the context of performance, dance, and queer community building, is taking place within that field. At the center of their work is the social technique of eCPR, a form of emotional crisis intervention that can be learned by anyone and practiced in groups independently of institutional medicine. Based on their experience with this technique, the workshop uses somatic and dialogical scores to open up a space for strengthening one's own body awareness, and experiencing resonance as an embodied process. One's own feelings are here not linked to biographical narratives, but the focus is on perceiving them as physical sensations in the present, finding ways to communicate them, and sensing what happens internally when I witness such communications.
cait fisher (they/she) is a queer community organizer, social artist and trainer. They were a professional football player (Brazil, Sweden, USA) before turning to embodied movements from the pitch as tools for somatic activism, healing and recovery. They are focused on collective explorations of team without sport for finding each other in radical attunement. They explore processes of deceleration in relation to the felt sense with technologies of mutual empowerment, co-resonance and collective care. They are a facilitator of Emotional CPR, a peer-led community mental health approach; organizer and dancer with the Social Pleasure Center, and labor union organizer.
>>> Registration till 28th of November: Email to zett@hgb-leipzig.de (Limited to 12 participants)
Speculative practices within AI + drawing on queer performance theory and uncertainty as a generative force
Date: 5 December 2025
Venue: Halle 14
Workshop schedule: 1:30pm-3:30pm
Through their proposed methodologies of dragging and unlearning, Mersin & Uçkunkaya work with contemporary AI technologies from the inside, inhabiting its imaginaries while refusing their closures. They treat uncertainty as a generative force, while drawing on disidentificatory strategies and drag practices. Through shared narration and hands-on experimentation with deepfake technologies, their workshop and performance open space for queer play and the ongoing reimagining of artificial imaginaries from within.
Yağmur Uçkunkaya works with AI technologies across artistic and interdisciplinary contexts, focusing on its emergent imaginaries, societal implications and operational processes. Holding a Bachelor’s in Medieninformatik, she spent several years at a creative AI agency, contributing to projects ranging from anarchic speech instruments to intelligent irrigation prediction systems for Berlin’s urban trees. Her current practice centers on research-driven, critical perspectives on AI applications, informed in part by her Master’s studies in Design & Computation at TU–UdK Berlin. Recent projects have been presented at Ars Electronica Festival, GAK Bremen, and the Frankfurt Biennale. She is currently a lecturer at Universität der Künste Berlin and Folkwang Universität der Künste.
Orhun Mersin, better known as Kekik, is a Turkish drag artist, AI researcher, and dancer based in Berlin. Trained as a contemporary dancer and holding a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, they have been part of the research platform New Practice in Art and Technology at TU–UdK Berlin. Active both in queer academics and queer nightlife, they facilitate lectures and workshops –in drag on drag– and they have obtained their MA with a thesis proposing and exploring “dragging” as a speculative methodology rooted in queer failure, creating alternative images in which the future can be lived. Currently, they are a research fellow at the University of Freiburg, and their works have been showcased in Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Sophiensæle, HEK Basel, Schauspiel Dortmund, Ars Electronica, b3 Biennale Frankfurt.
>>> Registration till 28th of November: Email to goldox@hgb-leipzig.de (Limited to 15 participants)