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

HOTHOUSE is realized in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation - Global Unit for Human Security, Vienna Office; Tactical Tech, Berlin; Technopolitics, Vienna; the Lisbon Architecture Triennale; 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 focussing 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.

The Future of Demonstration resolves the conventional separation between art (exhibition), discourse (symposium) and archive (documentation). Instead, it creates participatory formats and choreographies that combine digital and physical space, discourse, conversation, performance, installation, visuals, soundscape, music, video and film.

The art series is based on a what we call a postdisciplinary practice: in a performative-discursive framework contributors from art, activism, policy, philosophy, science, technology and other fields jointly explore human and nonhuman forms, intensities and consequences of collective practice. We do not treat fields and disciplines as distinct. Rather, we invite them to contribute to demonstration as a collaborative method for new narratives, techniques, and affiliations of resistance. What does it take to bring forth an inclusive socio-ecological paradigm, a re-entanglement with the planetary, a new perception of the world?

What is at stake today is the indispensable and at the same time beautiful task to collectively create counter-imagination and counter-movements that combine technological, social, cultural, and biological epistemes, phenomena, and imagery. The audience is an active part in these experiments in technopolitical resolution.