Over the past year DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign has brought together artists and thinkers with the goal of shifting how we understand the entangled relationship between technology and power, through as connected programme of residencies and events across Central Europe leading up to the exhibition at Galerie Rudolfinum. Alongside the exhibition, the one-day symposium Sovereign Body, hosted by Goethe-Institut Czechia, will connect the outcomes of the DATAS project with new and developing work from artists and researchers at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague.
 
While sovereignty is usually thought about at the national and international level, this symposium will pay attention to the ways we experience the effects of sovereignty as individual subjects. In the age of ubiquitous data collection, sovereign power can operate on a much smaller, more individual scale. As ever more of our actions and existence in the world become sources of data, and therefore opportunities for control, bodily and technological sovereignty become increasingly entangled. At the same time, as DATAS expert Olga Goriunova describes, increasingly complex ways of processing data means that it can ‘come alive’, creating our digital doubles that seem to have more power over us than we have over them. But if our data has a life, if also has an afterlife, as DATAS artist Tamara Kametani says in her video Workarounds (2025): “Once data cannot be further processed and no capital can be extracted from it, it becomes little more than a useless surplus, rendering all surveillance […] a futile act.” 

Sovereign Body will bring together DATAS artists and experts with new research from AVU’s academics, doctoral and master’s students. DATAS curator Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás will introduce the project’s exhibition and residency programme, and situate the symposium’s focus within contemporary discussions of data sovereignty. DATAS artist Jelena Visković will discuss her new moving image work HEAT (2026) which, drawing on the tropes of the spa-novella, reflects on the connections between technology, environmental policy, and necropolitics. Philosopher and researcher Ádám Lovász will introduce his concept of the Digital Leviathan, a reconfiguration of the sovereignty that is both technological and philosophical, and which seeks to order the spontaneity of human experience, rendering the behaviour of subjects legible and predictable. Denisa Michalinová will present on the datafication of reproduction through her doctoral work on artificial wombs and Alice Ullspergerová, in collaboration with Palo Fabuš, will present her ongoing project AAEGG (Artificial Angel's Egg), a device that allows people to interact with their own digital representation. Jiří Kaňák will explore anthropomorphism in relation to machines and digital representations, in the context of human mortality within a data-driven environment, focussing on the transformation of digital footprints into digital remains, and Ava Holtzman will present her research on the transformation of digital worlds into physical ‘screenograms’ foregrounding the removal and afterlife images through material and embodied processes. 

Speakers

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás DATAS curator Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás will focus on the impact of information technology on the notion of sovereignty as interpreted by artists, who participated in the residency programme and display their work in the exhibition at Rudolfinum. 

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás is a curator, researcher, author, and educator working across art, media, politics, and digital infrastructures. Her practice integrates theoretical inquiry and exhibition-making to examine the social and political implications of computation and algorithmic culture. Her research focuses on the shift from exhibitions as representational formats to platforms for model-making and worldbuilding, foregrounding how technological systems shape power and collective imagination. She has curated exhibitions at institutions including ZKM | Karlsruhe; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; or Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. She recently edited Beyond Matter, Within Space (2023), lectures and conducts research at University College London and the University of Art and Design Lausanne.

Ádám Lovász Ádám Lovász will introduce his concept of the Digital Leviathan, a reconfiguration of the sovereignty that is both technological and philosophical, and which seeks to order the spontaneity of human experience, rendering the behaviour of subjects legible and predictable. 

Lovász is an independent philosopher and researcher. Lovász's research interests centre on posthumanism, process philosophy, complexity theory and 21st century approaches to politics. Among Lovász's most notable works to date are the following monographs: H. P. Lovecraft and Posthumanism (2026, with Márk Horváth and Márió Z. Nemes), Updating Bergson (2021); A valóság visszatérése (2019; with Márk Horváth and Márk Losoncz); A poszthumanizmus változatai (with Márk Horváth and Márió Z. Nemes). Lovász has published in peer-reviewed journals in the field of philosophy, social and political theory. 

Jelena Visković A presentation and discussion of Jelena Visković’snew moving-image workHEAT, reimagining the literary trope of Eastern European spa-novelaas a stage or situation for introspection and healing, but also where underlying social tension can unfold.

Viskovićis an artist born in 1989 in Zagreb, raised between Belgrade and Budapest, currently living and working in London. She works with recreation, situation, disobedience and play to explore how bodies–social,politicaland technological–are shaped by systems of power. Her films, games and sculptural works incorporate playful, animated, talking objects that make their way into technologically deterministic systems. Borrowing from a carnivalesque logic, they become rebellious but approachable,attemptingto resist the enclosures of borders, institutions,archivesand databases.

Denisa Michalinová  Denisa Michalinová’s presentation will explore the technology of artificial wombs in the context of data extraction and surveillance. This speculative investigation will take shape through selected examples of contemporary art in relation to a critical reflection on the medical gaze, transhumanist bioengineering and the datafication of the remediated pregnant body. 

Michalinová is an art theorist and historian, and a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In her interdisciplinary research, she focuses on corporeality, new technologies and contemporary philosophy. She is the author of the monograph Light as a Medium: Artificial Light in Czech Visual Art from the 1990s to the Present (2025). She also works as a lecturer at the National Gallery in Prague. 

Alice Ullspergerová & Palo Fabuš  Alice Ullspergerová’s AAEGG: Digital Twin as an Interface with Oneself is an art project that reimagines the Tamagotchi as a health self-care device, letting users interact with a digital twin fed by their own health data, particularly aimed at people living with illness. While eHealth technologies promise new transparency into the body's opaque inner workings, AAEGG argues this transparency is at best translucency, introducing computational opacity alongside whatever clarity it offers. In collaboration with theorist Palo Fabuš, Ullspergerová will present her work in a broader theoretical context. 

Alice Ullspergerová studied photography at FAMU and is currently studying Art and Contemporary Technologies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her experience as a 3D Clinical Specialist, where she worked on digital modifications of patients’ dentition, has shaped her interest in translating the physical body into digital form and exploring its reciprocal impact on bodily experience. She works with organic 3D modelling and haptic technologies, which she understands as a way of reintroducing touch into the digital environment, beyond the distance of the cursor.  

Palo Fabuš studied applied informatics and Media Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, sociology at Charles University in Prague, and philosophy at the Ruhr Universität in Bochum. From 2009 he was an editor of Umělec magazine and from 2011 the editor-in-chief. Currently, he teaches at the Centre of Audiovisual Studies, FAMU in Prague, and on MA Art and Contemporary Technology at AVU. In 2017, he published Přednáška o vznikavosti together with poet Luboš Svoboda. His research centres on the relationship of digital ecology and the human condition. His forthcoming book I’d Like to Be Addicted to a Freely Available Cure comes out in 2027, published by FaVU Brno and ArtMap. 
 
Jiří Kaňák   Jiří Kaňák’s presentation will explore anthropomorphism in relation to machines and digital representations, in the context of human mortality within a data-driven environment. This discussion will focus on the transformation of the digital footprint into digital remains, and on how these processes shape perceptions of identity and existence. Through selected examples of contemporary art and cultural, the presentation will explore how these phenomena intersect with broader technological imaginaries and conceptions of the interfaces between humans and machines in the contemporary world. 

Kaňák is an artist currently studying in the New Media 1 studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In his work, he combines technology, mechanical principles and spatial objects with narrative elements. He has long been engaged with themes of digital and machine anthropomorphism, the relationship between humans and technology, and the transformations of human experience in a data-driven world. He currently focuses on the phenomena of digital folklore and thanatosensitivity: the relationship to one’s own mortality in the context of technological systems and data representations. 

Ava Holtzman Using a personal archive of screenshots from Second Life alongside constructed analogue ‘screenograms’, Holtzman’s research examines screenshotting as a native photographic practice within computational environments, where the photographer’s role becomes selecting from images already continuously produced by the system. Through observations of digital landscapes designed for ephemerality and circulation, it theorises photography as a negotiation with platform logics, foregrounding embodiment, materialisation, removal and afterlife as central photographic operations. 

Ava Holtzman is an artist and curator based in Prague. Currently completing the MFA Art in Context at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, her work is focused on the preservation and fossilization of digital and ephemeral beings and spaces. Her research investigates the changing role of photographic image in its networked and digital forms, engaging with experimental forms of image-making such as in-game photography and experimental darkroom techniques. 

Organisers

Hana Janečková
Hana Janečková is a writer, curator and theorist currently based in Prague. She is Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague (AVU), contributing to Socialist Anthropocene and Maternal Studies research groups. She was the curator of the Czech Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2024). She is the author of the upcoming monograph Beyond the Body: Feminist Alliances in Contemporary Art ( 2026) and the editor of collective monographs Animal Touch (2021), and Multilogues on the Now: On Glands, Membranes and Cavities (2022).  Her projects were presented internationally including Villa Albertine, New York; Museum of Zagreb (MUSA), SAHA Istanbul and the Stuart Hall Lecture at Goldsmiths College London. Upcoming curatorial collaborations include Duane and Tanya Lukin Linklater’s exhibition at Gallery Rudolfinum (September 2026). 

John Hill
John Hill is a writer and researcher, who has lived in Prague since 2017. He teaches Art Writing on the Art in Context international masters at AVU, where he also leads the Emergent Technologies Research Group. His writing has appeared in Frieze Magazine, PARSE Journal, Spike, Artalk, Most Magazine and Camera Austria International. His PhD, which explored artistic collaboration inspired by network technology, was undertaken with LJMU's Uses of Art group, a partner of the L’Internationale museum network. As a member of the artists’ collective LuckyPDF, he has had work exhibited internationally and been commissioned by major institutions, including Hayward Gallery and Frieze Foundation.