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Issue 1/26 – Data Materialities
Today's art and art education institutions are at a crucial threshold: data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence have become the raw materials of a new industrial era in which the relationship between art, technology, and society must be fundamentally renegotiated. What were once aesthetic interventions and adaptations in the midst of different phases of industrial production now require a rethinking in the digital space. springerin 1/26 "Data Materialities", produced in cooperation with the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, asks how art can assert itself in the midst of data-driven processes—or even transform them. Data should no longer be understood as abstract streams of information, but as something physical, malleable, and capable of being shaped. How can artistic practices not only utilize machine learning, but also question, transform, subvert, and realign it?
What forms of thinking and aesthetic practice emerge when algorithms become creative material? The discussion extends far beyond technical questions: it concerns ethics, representation, and indeed critical and democratic participation in AI–as well as the possibility of developing different ideas of intelligence and creativity from an artistic perspective. In addition, this issue also asks how artistic knowledge can be understood as a driver of social transformation. "Data Materialities" attempts to take this vision further–and thus to do justice to the complecx dynamics of digital chance in a critical, imaginative, and ultimately humanistic way.
Publication date: 16. März 2026