HOTHOUSE: A Renegade Lab for Democracy against Technocapitalist Authoritarianism

HOTHOUSE is Season 5 of The Future of Demonstration, an art series by Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler.

HOTHOUSE is realised in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation - Global Unit for Human Security, Vienna; Tactical Tech, Berlin; Technopolitics, Vienna; and with contributions by adO/Aptive; Forensic Architecture/Centre for Research Architecture; the Stop Killer Robot Coalition; and Territorial Agency amongst others.

With artificial intelligence, a transformative power has emerged that will have a massive impact on our lives. Already, many people use chatbots and see them as an enrichment to their lives and work.

Yet, every promise hides a claim, and recent AI applications indicate that the promise of a more participatory, diverse and equitable world – and hence a better planetary future – veers towards a profoundly reactionary deepening of AI control. Digitally, socially, and psychologically, the claim to power unleashes binary hell.

Corporate AI is the new frontier of capitalist extraction. Its game is all life and matter. We call it the turn from AI gamification to AI weaponization.

What does it mean to resist? How do successful counter-alliances and counter-investigations operate? What can be done to expose and resolve power schemes that abuse AI infrastructure? How can we reorient the agency of resistance towards insurrections that are politically and culturally adaptable, fluid, and resilient (as the German term “Widerständigkeit” implies compared to “Widerstand”)? In contrast to machines, we can betray systems and agents of oppression.

HOTHOUSE brings together artists, activists, practitioners and thinkers from around the world to challenge emerging AI supremacy and how it extracts, classifies, governs and even annihilates life. They will participate in real time via a new collective technology: 3D-point cloud video sharing allows us to create a collaborative space of shared presence at Atelier Augarten, regardless of where contributors are located on Earth.

HOTHOUSE will host four performative-discursive events, each focusing on a specific aspect of the theme. They are part of an installation that combines digital and analogue means and consists of objects, artefacts, point clouds, maps, posters, documentary films, videos, sound, songs, and podcasts. Talks and workshops will allow for deeper understanding and practice-based interventions.

We don't play with corporate AI aesthetics. We don’t use AI to make “art”. We don’t debate whether AI could become more ethical or behave nicer. Instead, we ask what it takes to reclaim agency and counter increasingly unbridled forms of domination, inequality and power.

You are invited to take part in this counter-exploration. 

Atelier Augarten
Scherzergasse 1a, 1020 Vienna