Exhibition
From 11 June 2026 to 30 August 2026, the exhibition—featuring artworks created during the DATAS residencies alongside additional works engaging with the project’s core themes—was on view at Prague’s renowned Galerie Rudolfinum, a leading contemporary art institution known for its ambitious curatorial programmes and international reach.
Who controls our data, personal sovereignty, and political freedom? Answers are offered by DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign, an exhibition in which Czech and international artists explore in their works how computing technologies, automation, and digital infrastructures undermine personal and state sovereignty.
The beasts that threaten us today are unlikely to be roaring lions; rather, they are algorithmic systems, data infrastructures, and AI-driven forms of governance that operate beyond effective democratic oversight.
This group exhibition confronts one of the defining struggles of the coming decades that is profoundly shaping human agency: the battle for sovereignty in an age when data and computation increasingly exceed legal and political control. As algorithmic systems influence public discourse, automate and manipulate decision-making, and shape the conduct of war, the foundations of democracy are being rewritten in code. Bringing together voices in art, philosophy, and technology the exhibition examines how personal and national self-determination might persist amid the forces of surveillance capitalism and authoritarianism.
The featured works range from interactive installations to narrative films and software art. They move beyond critique to model ethical alternatives to extractive digital regimes. The exhibition unfolds across three constellations. Spectres of the Leviathanaddresses the datafied sovereign, examining algocracy, cybersecurity, and automated governance. Islands of Insubordination focuses on infrastructures such as energy networks, submarine cables, and data centres, revealing sovereignty as a form of logistical and computational power with ecological consequences. Songs of Refusal explores the fragility of personal sovereignty under conditions of profiling, prediction, and surveillance, where images become operative within systems of control.
– Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, curator
Exhibiting artists: aaajiao, Tekla Aslanishvili, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán, Mark Cinkevich, Critical Tech Group (Nazar Golianych and Nastia Kolodka), Nina Davies, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Anna Engelhardt, eeefff, fantastic little splash (Lera Malchenko and Oleksandr Hants), Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Flaka Haliti, Tamara Kametani, Áron Lődi, Artur Magrot, Martyna Marciniak, Leon Sahiti, Rudolf Samohejl, Sfera (Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter and Ula Sowa Przybylska), Jonas Staal, Jelena Visković
A publication of the same name is being released to accompany the exhibition.
Publication Contribution by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás
Any aesthetics or politics today must engage with data – its circulation, its infrastructures and the techno-logies that both surround and embed it. Aesthetics, as a philosophical inquiry into perception, sensibility and experience, particularly in relation to art, has long been entangled with both politics and technology. Without rehearsing the etymologies of these terms (a detour that would ultimately return us to the same point), we can acknowledge that political art and digital art are well-established categories. All works presented in this book and exhibition operate within one or both of these domains.
What remains less firmly articulated is the connection between politics and technology. This project addresses that gap in a specific way: through visual artworks and their interpretations that bind these spheres together, rendering their mutual implications perceptible.
Both the publication and the exhibition entitled DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign share a tripartite structure. Three thematic clusters address distinct yet interrelated dimensions of sovereignty in its convergence with data, examining how sovereignty is discussed, enacted and manifested through artistic practice. Across texts, images and installations, a wide range of topics is explored. What unites these contributions is a shared concern with ongoing epistemological shifts driven by the growing significance of computation in political life and representation – particularly the pervasive influence of machine learning systems.
Each chapter opens with a commissioned essay. The three authors, writing from different disciplinary perspectives, mobilise a dense constellation of references and establish the conceptual groundwork for the chapters that follow. Concise, yet substantial, contributions by the resident artists reflect on their projects, complemented by texts from the theorists, curators and artists with whom they were in dialogue. In this way, each residency project is illuminated from two perspectives – both articulated and interpreted in a dual register.
Sovereignty, one of the two key terms under scrutiny, functions here as a conceptual double bind and is approached on two scales. First, political sovereignty denotes the claim to ultimate authority within a territory or political order. It asserts supreme power over law and governance while simultaneously positioning itself as standing outside or above the legal frameworks it establishes. Second, personal sovereignty refers to the individual’s capacity and right to determine their own body, identity, actions, and life course without illegitimate external coercion – self-governance at the level of the subject. In German, this corresponds most directly to Selbstbestimmung.
The opening and closing chapters address these two poles of sovereignty’s semantic spectrum, reconsidering them in light of contemporary information technology. The central chapter mediates between these scales, threading together fictitious and actual territories. Here, borders are crossed, technological and political infrastructures are interrogated and the politics and aesthetics of truth are critically examined.
Entitled Spectres of the Leviathan, the first chapter examines how contemporary power operates through digital infrastructures, data systems and computational governance. It seeks to formulate revised definitions of sovereignty that extend beyond geographically bounded statehood. In his opening essay, Adam Lovasz sets the conceptual tone by describing a technodeterministic regime of algorithmic governance, or ‘algocracy,’ rooted in behaviourism and realised through surveillance capitalism. Drawing on Thomas Hobbes, he argues that sovereignty has shifted from territorially anchored state power to distributed, data-driven infrastructures. This regime is legitimised by ‘Dataism,’ an epistemology that replaces causality with correlation and elevates metrics as the ultimate arbiters of truth. Lovasz critiques the resistance grounded in the reclamation of human agency, indeterminism, and what he terms the ‘right to the future tense,’ positioned against the totalising certainty of algorithmic control.
The datafication of the Leviathan, an entity that is both sovereign and beast, forms the central motif of this chapter and of the exhibition’s first cluster of artwork. Hobbes’s Leviathan was imagined as a composite body of subjects, but today’s Leviathan cannot be conceived without calculating machines. The automation of governance though is not a recent phenomenon. To counter rigid determinism, contingency was incorporated into democratic procedures as early as antiquity, illustrated in the exhibition by a replica of a kleroterion.1 Much later, in the twentieth century, cybernetics marked a decisive moment in attempts to automate governance, exemplified by Viktor Glushkov’s effort in the Soviet Union to establish a nationwide computer network that might have prefigured the internet.
Building on this historical trajectory, Critical Tech Group presents a compact system that simulates four distinct states, each operating according to its own logic. In response, Tiziana Terranova observes that the project probes whether modern nation-states have themselves become cybernetic machines engaged in data processing, optimisation and competitive calculation. The work juxtaposes earlier socialist cybernetic imaginaries, in which computation functioned as a tool for collective planning, with the contemporary ‘technostate,’ which appears increasingly aligned with networked capitalism. It ultimately asks whether democratic socialism can reclaim the computational state and what forms of resistance remain possible against machine-like sovereignty.
A related line of inquiry informs a computer game addressing cybersecurity infrastructures in Belarus. Mark Cinkevich challenges the presumed neutrality of algorithmic systems, arguing that contemporary occupation no longer depends on physically interrupting territorial flows but on governing their conditions, particularly the flow of data. As Vladan Joler notes, the project’s conceptual core lies in its modelling of surveillance as calibration, revealing how resistance itself becomes data input that feeds and refines algorithmic governance.
Alongside the Belarusian case study, Hungary’s surveillance regime is examined through Áron Lődi’s investigation, materialised in a series of sculptures that demonstrate how power emerges from fragile, heterogeneous assemblages rather than seamless sovereignty. While computational systems are reconfiguring governance worldwide, their implementation varies according to ‘local terroir,’ producing differing degrees of centralisation, control and instability. In her accompanying essay, Olga Goriunova introduces the notion of a ‘politics of suspense,’ in which technical capacities for surveillance and violence, particularly AI-driven data analytics, are developed and readied without necessarily being enacted, generating a persistent condition of anticipatory threat.
Within the exhibition, the digitisation of the Leviathan ultimately condenses into infrastructural concerns. Installations by Artur Magrot and Rudolf Samohejl, part of the same thematic cluster, perform infrastructural critique through motifs such as a creaking, unstable pavement and an inhumanly heavy helmet. Samohejl’s work, conceived as an embodied non-representation of a data center, gestures toward the inhuman scale, and the implied tragedy, of the global computational stack. In doing so, it leads directly into the exhibition’s next cluster and the subsequent chapter of this book.
The second chapter, Islands of Insubordination, opens with Václav Janoščík’s extensive analysis of what he terms the tragedy of infrastructures. He argues that contemporary technological, political and ecological crises should not be understood as isolated breakdowns or as repetitions of history but as manifestations of a structural condition. Drawing on Marx’s distinction between tragedy and farce, Janoščík contends that digital technology and platform systems have transformed narrative itself. Infrastructures are not merely technical systems; they function as narrative frameworks through which we access, interpret and inhabit the world. Rather than a ‘tragedy of the commons,’ he proposes a tragedy of infrastructures: systems of scale, lift, fold and drag that reproduce capitalist power, shape attention and affect, and foreclose political agency. Infrastructural critique, therefore, must expose and rethink these underlying conditions of possibility within the technosphere.2
This premise informs the exhibited installations of Martyna Marcziniak and Anna Engelhardt, who guide viewers to the boundary between fact and fiction and to the limits of forensic precision. Rather than rejecting representation outright or adopting an iconoclastic stance, their examination of the infrastructures of objectivity and visual evidence calls for revision. Within the same cluster of the show, Tekla Aslanishvili and Jonas Staal also address infrastructural questions, but through situated investigations. One traces the rivers of the South Caucasus; the other turns to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.
As part of the chapter, short contributions lay out the work of resident artists Sfera and Tamara Kametani who engage with unreal or non-locations. Instead of examining a contemporary technological infrastructure, Sfera builds on the 1984 Biosphere 2 experiment. As noted by RYBN.ORG, who advised the group, the project constitutes a critical and minimalist reenactment of this forty-year-old techno-utopia. Kametani’s work on the Null Island, by contrast, is not utopian but emerges from absence: digital objects without geolocation data are automatically assigned to a fictional, zero-area site at coordinates 0°N 0°E in the Atlantic Ocean. As Victoria Ivanova observes, Kametani’s gesture of migrating data to this abstract coordinate reverses the dominant logic of extraction.
In contrast to a single possibility, the featured chalk drawing by Nolan Oswald Dennis depicts recursivity and contingency in history and enables the audience to contribute to the wall piece with their own ‘options’ for tragedy and farce. This multiplication of perspectives resonates closely with Janoščík’s argument and serves as an entry point into the chapter.
This section interweaves multiple tropes and mediates between the preceding and subsequent chapters. It bridges the two principal dimensions of sovereignty explored in the book by examining fictional and speculative, but also reimagined, geographies as spaces in which agency might be reclaimed, camouflage devised or anti-surveillance utopias constructed.
The final chapter, Songs of Refusal, foregrounds the emotional, embodied and cultural dimensions of algorithmic power. Opening with Mojca Pajnik’s essay, it interrogates the status of the subject within a political order increasingly structured by algorithmic authority. Pajnik argues that European borders have been transformed by digital technologies, shifting from territorial checkpoints to algorithmic systems that reorganise border violence by embedding it in routine administrative and technical processes. Exclusion is thereby depoliticised even as racialised surveillance intensifies under surveillance capitalism. She conceptualises borders as infrastructures of strategic cruelty that normalise suffering while obscuring accountability.
In dialogue with this socially engaged approach, the fantastic little splash collective, in consultation with Kim Albrecht, further developed their long-term project during the residency that analyses inauthentic online communication, transforming disinformation into an observable object. Albrecht characterises it as ‘counter-counter information,’ reflecting not only on propaganda but also on the mechanics of counter-narratives. It thus operates as a second-order observation of data as a contested and weaponised medium.
The tension between autonomy and automation also informs Jelena Visković’s science-fiction film, set in an AI-augmented Baltic spa where three women navigate aging, desire and technologically mediated care within the architecture of revived Soviet modernism. In response, Bogna Konior examines the gendered politics of technological utopias and the friction between autonomy and automation. Rather than resolving this tension, the work stages an atmospheric inquiry into how bodies, architecture and AI co-produce futures shaped by both longing and constraint.
In the chapter, Leon Sahiti’s project similarly addresses the dynamic between automation and the self, reflecting on digital subjectivity under platform capitalism. Algorithmic systems, he suggests, condition users into recursive, self-reducing copies shaped by selection pressure rather than free will. Sovereignty appears increasingly illusory as platforms absorb critique, monetise attention and render the human ‘uneconomic.’ In response, Anna Ehrenstein offers a script for collective and confrontational hypnosis that directly addresses platform power.
The exhibition extends these concerns through works that confront affective manipulation and disinformation on social media, as well as algorithmic embodi-ment and bodily autonomy in the era of digital twins. Visitors become participants in an involuntary feedback loop when smartphone cameras track and mirror them as they approach Nina Davies’s installation. Continuous surveillance manifests in the sculpture of aaajiao, then the exhibition concludes with Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s disquieting scenario in which a single protagonist confronts a mirror image and digital double.
Taken together, the texts and artistic positions presented in this volume point to a contemporary condition in which machine and sovereignty are deeply entangled, recalling Yuk Hui’s formulation.3 Data, once regarded as an epistemic instrument of enlightenment, has become a meta-medium and a terrain of power, misinformation and information warfare. Many of the contributions identify this shift and underscore the urgency of reclaiming digital sovereignty in an increasingly dystopian technological landscape.4 They raise pressing questions: How can decision-making be delegated to partially or fully automated, statistically driven systems without eroding self-determination? What practices are viable forms of resistance under ubiquitous surveillance? What forms of sovereignty remain possible when borders, governance and identities are encoded and administered through computational infrastructures? How do algorithmic systems reshape the affective terrain of public discourse, and what agency persists when emotion is weaponised through synthetic voices and inauthentic actors? How do we confront the spectral remnants of surveillance regimes, including corrupted data, partial archives and invisible subjects? And what might personal and technological sovereignty mean in a future where care, control and automation are inseparably intertwined?
__________
1 A kleroterion was a stone allotment device used in classical Athens to randomly select citizens for public offices and jury service. It operationalised sortition (selection by lot) central to Athenian democracy.
2 The technosphere denotes the planetary-scale assemblage of technological artefacts, infrastructures, energy systems, extraction networks, institutions and human actors that collectively sustain and reproduce industrial civilisation. The term was coined in 1990 by geoscientist Peter K. Haff to describe this emergent Earth system operating alongside and in entanglement with the biosphere. See Haff’s ‘Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well-Being,’ Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395, no. 1 (May 2014): 301–09, https://doi.org/10.1144/SP395.4.
3 Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
4 A collective proposal by the Democratic and Ecological Digital Sovereignty Coalition was published in 2024 under the title Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty: A Roadmap to Build a Digital Stack for People and the Planet, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/publications/2024/dec/reclaiming-digital-sovereignty.
Who controls our data, personal sovereignty, and political freedom? Answers are offered by DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign, an exhibition in which Czech and international artists explore in their works how computing technologies, automation, and digital infrastructures undermine personal and state sovereignty.
The beasts that threaten us today are unlikely to be roaring lions; rather, they are algorithmic systems, data infrastructures, and AI-driven forms of governance that operate beyond effective democratic oversight.
This group exhibition confronts one of the defining struggles of the coming decades that is profoundly shaping human agency: the battle for sovereignty in an age when data and computation increasingly exceed legal and political control. As algorithmic systems influence public discourse, automate and manipulate decision-making, and shape the conduct of war, the foundations of democracy are being rewritten in code. Bringing together voices in art, philosophy, and technology the exhibition examines how personal and national self-determination might persist amid the forces of surveillance capitalism and authoritarianism.
The featured works range from interactive installations to narrative films and software art. They move beyond critique to model ethical alternatives to extractive digital regimes. The exhibition unfolds across three constellations. Spectres of the Leviathanaddresses the datafied sovereign, examining algocracy, cybersecurity, and automated governance. Islands of Insubordination focuses on infrastructures such as energy networks, submarine cables, and data centres, revealing sovereignty as a form of logistical and computational power with ecological consequences. Songs of Refusal explores the fragility of personal sovereignty under conditions of profiling, prediction, and surveillance, where images become operative within systems of control.
– Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, curator
Exhibiting artists: aaajiao, Tekla Aslanishvili, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán, Mark Cinkevich, Critical Tech Group (Nazar Golianych and Nastia Kolodka), Nina Davies, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Anna Engelhardt, eeefff, fantastic little splash (Lera Malchenko and Oleksandr Hants), Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Flaka Haliti, Tamara Kametani, Áron Lődi, Artur Magrot, Martyna Marciniak, Leon Sahiti, Rudolf Samohejl, Sfera (Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter and Ula Sowa Przybylska), Jonas Staal, Jelena Visković
A publication of the same name is being released to accompany the exhibition.
Publication Contribution by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás
Rambling Aesthetic Politics Through Technology: An Editorial and Guide to the Eponymous Exhibition
Any aesthetics or politics today must engage with data – its circulation, its infrastructures and the techno-logies that both surround and embed it. Aesthetics, as a philosophical inquiry into perception, sensibility and experience, particularly in relation to art, has long been entangled with both politics and technology. Without rehearsing the etymologies of these terms (a detour that would ultimately return us to the same point), we can acknowledge that political art and digital art are well-established categories. All works presented in this book and exhibition operate within one or both of these domains.What remains less firmly articulated is the connection between politics and technology. This project addresses that gap in a specific way: through visual artworks and their interpretations that bind these spheres together, rendering their mutual implications perceptible.
Both the publication and the exhibition entitled DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign share a tripartite structure. Three thematic clusters address distinct yet interrelated dimensions of sovereignty in its convergence with data, examining how sovereignty is discussed, enacted and manifested through artistic practice. Across texts, images and installations, a wide range of topics is explored. What unites these contributions is a shared concern with ongoing epistemological shifts driven by the growing significance of computation in political life and representation – particularly the pervasive influence of machine learning systems.
Each chapter opens with a commissioned essay. The three authors, writing from different disciplinary perspectives, mobilise a dense constellation of references and establish the conceptual groundwork for the chapters that follow. Concise, yet substantial, contributions by the resident artists reflect on their projects, complemented by texts from the theorists, curators and artists with whom they were in dialogue. In this way, each residency project is illuminated from two perspectives – both articulated and interpreted in a dual register.
Sovereignty, one of the two key terms under scrutiny, functions here as a conceptual double bind and is approached on two scales. First, political sovereignty denotes the claim to ultimate authority within a territory or political order. It asserts supreme power over law and governance while simultaneously positioning itself as standing outside or above the legal frameworks it establishes. Second, personal sovereignty refers to the individual’s capacity and right to determine their own body, identity, actions, and life course without illegitimate external coercion – self-governance at the level of the subject. In German, this corresponds most directly to Selbstbestimmung.
The opening and closing chapters address these two poles of sovereignty’s semantic spectrum, reconsidering them in light of contemporary information technology. The central chapter mediates between these scales, threading together fictitious and actual territories. Here, borders are crossed, technological and political infrastructures are interrogated and the politics and aesthetics of truth are critically examined.
Entitled Spectres of the Leviathan, the first chapter examines how contemporary power operates through digital infrastructures, data systems and computational governance. It seeks to formulate revised definitions of sovereignty that extend beyond geographically bounded statehood. In his opening essay, Adam Lovasz sets the conceptual tone by describing a technodeterministic regime of algorithmic governance, or ‘algocracy,’ rooted in behaviourism and realised through surveillance capitalism. Drawing on Thomas Hobbes, he argues that sovereignty has shifted from territorially anchored state power to distributed, data-driven infrastructures. This regime is legitimised by ‘Dataism,’ an epistemology that replaces causality with correlation and elevates metrics as the ultimate arbiters of truth. Lovasz critiques the resistance grounded in the reclamation of human agency, indeterminism, and what he terms the ‘right to the future tense,’ positioned against the totalising certainty of algorithmic control.
The datafication of the Leviathan, an entity that is both sovereign and beast, forms the central motif of this chapter and of the exhibition’s first cluster of artwork. Hobbes’s Leviathan was imagined as a composite body of subjects, but today’s Leviathan cannot be conceived without calculating machines. The automation of governance though is not a recent phenomenon. To counter rigid determinism, contingency was incorporated into democratic procedures as early as antiquity, illustrated in the exhibition by a replica of a kleroterion.1 Much later, in the twentieth century, cybernetics marked a decisive moment in attempts to automate governance, exemplified by Viktor Glushkov’s effort in the Soviet Union to establish a nationwide computer network that might have prefigured the internet.
Building on this historical trajectory, Critical Tech Group presents a compact system that simulates four distinct states, each operating according to its own logic. In response, Tiziana Terranova observes that the project probes whether modern nation-states have themselves become cybernetic machines engaged in data processing, optimisation and competitive calculation. The work juxtaposes earlier socialist cybernetic imaginaries, in which computation functioned as a tool for collective planning, with the contemporary ‘technostate,’ which appears increasingly aligned with networked capitalism. It ultimately asks whether democratic socialism can reclaim the computational state and what forms of resistance remain possible against machine-like sovereignty.
A related line of inquiry informs a computer game addressing cybersecurity infrastructures in Belarus. Mark Cinkevich challenges the presumed neutrality of algorithmic systems, arguing that contemporary occupation no longer depends on physically interrupting territorial flows but on governing their conditions, particularly the flow of data. As Vladan Joler notes, the project’s conceptual core lies in its modelling of surveillance as calibration, revealing how resistance itself becomes data input that feeds and refines algorithmic governance.
Alongside the Belarusian case study, Hungary’s surveillance regime is examined through Áron Lődi’s investigation, materialised in a series of sculptures that demonstrate how power emerges from fragile, heterogeneous assemblages rather than seamless sovereignty. While computational systems are reconfiguring governance worldwide, their implementation varies according to ‘local terroir,’ producing differing degrees of centralisation, control and instability. In her accompanying essay, Olga Goriunova introduces the notion of a ‘politics of suspense,’ in which technical capacities for surveillance and violence, particularly AI-driven data analytics, are developed and readied without necessarily being enacted, generating a persistent condition of anticipatory threat.
Within the exhibition, the digitisation of the Leviathan ultimately condenses into infrastructural concerns. Installations by Artur Magrot and Rudolf Samohejl, part of the same thematic cluster, perform infrastructural critique through motifs such as a creaking, unstable pavement and an inhumanly heavy helmet. Samohejl’s work, conceived as an embodied non-representation of a data center, gestures toward the inhuman scale, and the implied tragedy, of the global computational stack. In doing so, it leads directly into the exhibition’s next cluster and the subsequent chapter of this book.
The second chapter, Islands of Insubordination, opens with Václav Janoščík’s extensive analysis of what he terms the tragedy of infrastructures. He argues that contemporary technological, political and ecological crises should not be understood as isolated breakdowns or as repetitions of history but as manifestations of a structural condition. Drawing on Marx’s distinction between tragedy and farce, Janoščík contends that digital technology and platform systems have transformed narrative itself. Infrastructures are not merely technical systems; they function as narrative frameworks through which we access, interpret and inhabit the world. Rather than a ‘tragedy of the commons,’ he proposes a tragedy of infrastructures: systems of scale, lift, fold and drag that reproduce capitalist power, shape attention and affect, and foreclose political agency. Infrastructural critique, therefore, must expose and rethink these underlying conditions of possibility within the technosphere.2
This premise informs the exhibited installations of Martyna Marcziniak and Anna Engelhardt, who guide viewers to the boundary between fact and fiction and to the limits of forensic precision. Rather than rejecting representation outright or adopting an iconoclastic stance, their examination of the infrastructures of objectivity and visual evidence calls for revision. Within the same cluster of the show, Tekla Aslanishvili and Jonas Staal also address infrastructural questions, but through situated investigations. One traces the rivers of the South Caucasus; the other turns to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.
As part of the chapter, short contributions lay out the work of resident artists Sfera and Tamara Kametani who engage with unreal or non-locations. Instead of examining a contemporary technological infrastructure, Sfera builds on the 1984 Biosphere 2 experiment. As noted by RYBN.ORG, who advised the group, the project constitutes a critical and minimalist reenactment of this forty-year-old techno-utopia. Kametani’s work on the Null Island, by contrast, is not utopian but emerges from absence: digital objects without geolocation data are automatically assigned to a fictional, zero-area site at coordinates 0°N 0°E in the Atlantic Ocean. As Victoria Ivanova observes, Kametani’s gesture of migrating data to this abstract coordinate reverses the dominant logic of extraction.
In contrast to a single possibility, the featured chalk drawing by Nolan Oswald Dennis depicts recursivity and contingency in history and enables the audience to contribute to the wall piece with their own ‘options’ for tragedy and farce. This multiplication of perspectives resonates closely with Janoščík’s argument and serves as an entry point into the chapter.
This section interweaves multiple tropes and mediates between the preceding and subsequent chapters. It bridges the two principal dimensions of sovereignty explored in the book by examining fictional and speculative, but also reimagined, geographies as spaces in which agency might be reclaimed, camouflage devised or anti-surveillance utopias constructed.
The final chapter, Songs of Refusal, foregrounds the emotional, embodied and cultural dimensions of algorithmic power. Opening with Mojca Pajnik’s essay, it interrogates the status of the subject within a political order increasingly structured by algorithmic authority. Pajnik argues that European borders have been transformed by digital technologies, shifting from territorial checkpoints to algorithmic systems that reorganise border violence by embedding it in routine administrative and technical processes. Exclusion is thereby depoliticised even as racialised surveillance intensifies under surveillance capitalism. She conceptualises borders as infrastructures of strategic cruelty that normalise suffering while obscuring accountability.
In dialogue with this socially engaged approach, the fantastic little splash collective, in consultation with Kim Albrecht, further developed their long-term project during the residency that analyses inauthentic online communication, transforming disinformation into an observable object. Albrecht characterises it as ‘counter-counter information,’ reflecting not only on propaganda but also on the mechanics of counter-narratives. It thus operates as a second-order observation of data as a contested and weaponised medium.
The tension between autonomy and automation also informs Jelena Visković’s science-fiction film, set in an AI-augmented Baltic spa where three women navigate aging, desire and technologically mediated care within the architecture of revived Soviet modernism. In response, Bogna Konior examines the gendered politics of technological utopias and the friction between autonomy and automation. Rather than resolving this tension, the work stages an atmospheric inquiry into how bodies, architecture and AI co-produce futures shaped by both longing and constraint.
In the chapter, Leon Sahiti’s project similarly addresses the dynamic between automation and the self, reflecting on digital subjectivity under platform capitalism. Algorithmic systems, he suggests, condition users into recursive, self-reducing copies shaped by selection pressure rather than free will. Sovereignty appears increasingly illusory as platforms absorb critique, monetise attention and render the human ‘uneconomic.’ In response, Anna Ehrenstein offers a script for collective and confrontational hypnosis that directly addresses platform power.
The exhibition extends these concerns through works that confront affective manipulation and disinformation on social media, as well as algorithmic embodi-ment and bodily autonomy in the era of digital twins. Visitors become participants in an involuntary feedback loop when smartphone cameras track and mirror them as they approach Nina Davies’s installation. Continuous surveillance manifests in the sculpture of aaajiao, then the exhibition concludes with Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė’s disquieting scenario in which a single protagonist confronts a mirror image and digital double.
Taken together, the texts and artistic positions presented in this volume point to a contemporary condition in which machine and sovereignty are deeply entangled, recalling Yuk Hui’s formulation.3 Data, once regarded as an epistemic instrument of enlightenment, has become a meta-medium and a terrain of power, misinformation and information warfare. Many of the contributions identify this shift and underscore the urgency of reclaiming digital sovereignty in an increasingly dystopian technological landscape.4 They raise pressing questions: How can decision-making be delegated to partially or fully automated, statistically driven systems without eroding self-determination? What practices are viable forms of resistance under ubiquitous surveillance? What forms of sovereignty remain possible when borders, governance and identities are encoded and administered through computational infrastructures? How do algorithmic systems reshape the affective terrain of public discourse, and what agency persists when emotion is weaponised through synthetic voices and inauthentic actors? How do we confront the spectral remnants of surveillance regimes, including corrupted data, partial archives and invisible subjects? And what might personal and technological sovereignty mean in a future where care, control and automation are inseparably intertwined?
__________
1 A kleroterion was a stone allotment device used in classical Athens to randomly select citizens for public offices and jury service. It operationalised sortition (selection by lot) central to Athenian democracy.
2 The technosphere denotes the planetary-scale assemblage of technological artefacts, infrastructures, energy systems, extraction networks, institutions and human actors that collectively sustain and reproduce industrial civilisation. The term was coined in 1990 by geoscientist Peter K. Haff to describe this emergent Earth system operating alongside and in entanglement with the biosphere. See Haff’s ‘Technology as a Geological Phenomenon: Implications for Human Well-Being,’ Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395, no. 1 (May 2014): 301–09, https://doi.org/10.1144/SP395.4.
3 Yuk Hui, Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).
4 A collective proposal by the Democratic and Ecological Digital Sovereignty Coalition was published in 2024 under the title Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty: A Roadmap to Build a Digital Stack for People and the Planet, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/publications/2024/dec/reclaiming-digital-sovereignty.
