The Future of Demonstration

An art series by Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler

The Future of Demonstration is an art series that explores the aesthetic, technological, pedagogical, and political potentials offered by the term demonstration. Based on a new format, artists, activists, architects, philosophers, scientists and contributors from other fields jointly explore new forms, intensities and consequences of collective practice. With this postdisciplinary approach we want to reimagine, weave, share and demonstrate narratives, techniques and affiliations of resistance.

The third season of The Future of Demonstration addresses the materiality of the real and the digital. PLANETARY SKINS configures an osmotic skin between virtual and physical spaces to explore the potentials, ambivalences, and conflicts induced by hybrid forms of presence. Responding to interconnected phenomena – evoked by layers of technological advancements as well as social and ecological crises across the globe – the art project exists as a laboratory for new forms of ecologically, socially, and artistically engaged collective practice.

The first two seasons of The Future of Demonstration, conceived by Eckermann and Nestler in collaboration with Maximilian Thoman, were realised as the media art festival of the City of Vienna in 2017 and 2018. Based on the leitmotifs VERMÖGEN and PASSION, its eight episodes engaged with today's massive transformations in the ecological, technopolitical, economic and cultural spheres.