Vienna Digital Cultures

Vienna Digital Cultures is a new festival for art, performance and discourse, dedicated to exploring the cultural impact of digital technologies. Jointly organised by Foto Arsenal Wien and Kunsthalle Wien, the festival brings together international artists, experts and communities to critically reflect on the present moment shaped by digital transformation.

The first edition, curated by Nadim Samman, is titled “Model Collapse” – a term from the field of artificial intelligence that refers to the breakdown of diversity, originality and perspective. At the same time, it serves as a compelling metaphor for our time: amidst ecological crises, political instability and a post-truth public sphere, much appears to be out of balance.

Across two weeks, Vienna Digital Cultures brings installations, performances, talks, screenings and club nights to exhibition venues, public spaces and digital platforms. The festival positions itself as a space for critical inquiry and speculative imagination: how is technology reshaping perception, behaviour and identity?

Venues: Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab, Haus der Republik (Wiener Festwochen), REAKTOR, PRST.club and online.

The festival’s physical exhibition takes place at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz and features five international artists known for probing the intersection of politics and digital culture. The exhibition opens with Eva & Franco Mattes video But I love Human (2025), a montage of various TikTok live streamers performing as Non-Player Characters (NPCs) – a strange doorway into how algorithms are sculpting human subjectivity today. It is followed by Joey Holder’s installation The Woosphere (2025), an immersive fever dream that foregrounds the proliferation of non-human beings in our collective imagination. The work extends the artist’s digital commission on the festival website.

Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler’s S+T+ARTS Prize-winning Calculating Empires (2024) is a twenty-four meter long diagram charting the relationship between technology and power over the last half-millennium. Its mapping of how engineering subjects human bodies (and desires) to control is complemented by Arvida Byström’s video and sculptural investigation of deepfake porn and digital sexual futures. The latter also serves as a preamble to her offsite performance at Haus der Republik (Wiener Festwochen) – Funkhaus (A Cybernetic Dollhouse) in collaboration with an AI-powered sex-doll named Harmony. In a related vein, Mathias Gramoso explores the contemporary narcissus complex in Perpetual Echo (2024), documenting a 24-hour performance in which the artist stares at himself through his phone screen. Suffusing the space with coloured light, Troika’s installation casts the assembled works in the hues of the RGB filter, an optical regime associated with machine vision.

Learn more: https://viennadigitalcultures.at/