The festival’s exhibition took place at Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz and featured five artists known for probing the intersection of politics and digital culture. It opened 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 was 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 metre 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 served 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 his image on screen via his phone. Suffusing the space with coloured light, Troika’s installation cast the assembled works in the hues of the RGB filter, an optical regime associated with machine vision.

In the public space around Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, an Augmented Reality (AR) installation by Vienna-based artists Belma Bešlić-Gál, Catherine Spet and Markus Wintersberger was presented under the title //ONTOLOGICAL_GLITCH:// – in collaboration with Kultur 1. While probing weird overlaps between digital and physical experience, these works staged AI as an evolving, posthuman intelligence that transcends human perception. Does the AI still react to visitors, or has it entered an autonomous, self-sustaining process that no longer acknowledges our presence?