Debugging Realities

This exhibition asks how digital infrastructures shape our lives and how we respond to them. Focusing on algorithms, interfaces and data systems, it explores how these tools influence our bodies, identities, emotions and ideas of value.

Developed by artists from Make/Sense PhD and Transversal Design MA at the Critical Media Lab, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, the exhibition connects to Ars Electronica’s motto “Art, Technology & Society” by articulating how technology shapes society. In line with this year’s festival theme NEGOTIATING HUMANITY – FUTURE BEGINS, the works look at how we live with machines today and which human-machine relationships we are creating for the future.

The exhibition brings together five projects in installation, video and interactive media. Visitors will encounter a physical reflection on digital dependency (Restra*ned Des*re), a participatory web-based archive of queer coming-out experiences that invites collective storytelling and playful interaction (MINE/MINE), a soothing yet unsettling AI voice (let me hold you in my algorithms), a critical look at climate models and digital labor (Critical Debugging Practices) and a project on financial prediction and speculation (Opus Magnum—Supo Mungam).

The works relate to current cultural and political issues such as AI, digital labor and extractive economies. Together, they propose “debugging” as a way to better understand, question and reshape the systems that define our present—and our future.

Read more about the exhibition and the featured works here.