2024 (ongoing), Research Project

This project examines how Big Tech’s futuristic ventures—such as privatized cities, space colonization, and doomsday bunkers—reflect a „Politics of Isolation“ that seeks freedom through withdrawal from collective responsibility, legal oversight, and environmental limits. It argues that these seemingly isolated strategies depend on global networks of exploitation, echoing exclusionary ideologies and underscoring the need for an alternative vision centered on the ‚freedom to stay‘.

Talk, June 2025

This talk explores how Big Tech’s vision of the future—from privatized cities and space colonization to doomsday bunkers—reflects a growing ‘Politics of Isolation’. These projects signal the tech elite’s departure from a shared common ground: corporate-run territories as retreat from legal and regulatory frameworks, bunkers as escape from ecological limits, and space colonization as detachment from Earth itself. In this worldview, freedom is imagined as an escape from responsibility and the collective.

Yet, these isolationist strategies rely on global systems of labor and environmental extraction. What appears as isolation is, in fact, an exploitative relationship. This echoes right-wing ideologies, that promise belonging by drawing borders and claim common ground where there is exploitation. At its core is a liberal concept of freedom–rooted in property rights, unrestricted mobility, and withdrawal from collective responsibility.

For tech elites, this suggests an escape route from a world in crisis, while the majority are left to confront a collapsing planet. In contrast, the ‘freedom to stay’ requires the preservation of a collectively habitable world, where we have the right to remain present.

LINZ FMR, Festival for Art in Digital Contexts and Public Spaces

Talk, September 2024

„Homeland“ is more than a place; it’s the narration of an ideal that often excludes those who don’t fit that ideal. As a collective narrative, it shapes our vision of living together and is thereby also an imagination and negotiation of the future. Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian visions position exploitative and isolationist futures as the only possible option — future becomes an exodus from co-presence. A vision of privately owned cities and space colonization, in which the global elite abandons any notion of solidarity-based co-habitation. In contrast, the idea of staying requires the preservation of a collectively habitable world, where we have the right to remain present and to be at home.

„entangled homes“ exhibition at WHA Gallery organised by FIFTITU% as part of Ars Electronica 2024