Our CREATORS from the Merz Akademie in the New Media program invite you to their lecture series “Without Us” for the summer semester 2026, running from April 21 to May 26, every Tuesday at 18:15 CET, Teckstraße 58, 70190 Stuttgart. All lectures will be held in English.
It is 2026. We have tried all the key combinations and helped to build the world in which we are hardly needed anymore. Computer users have generated enough data, uploaded enough videos, photos, texts, and documents for AI slop to thrive and for the Dead Internet to zombie around forever. The world we once saw as a place where we can be ourselves – or become someone completely different – has squeezed and evaporated our dreams, producing a concentrate, a powder: easy to store and repurpose.
The digital today belongs to “ideal subjects” (Goriunova); non-playable characters write their own lore (de Seta). What does it mean to be “glitched and fragmented” (Menegon)? How does it feel to be “moss in between the sidewalks” (N.B. Spiders)? Will “we go dark when the servers go dark” (Diehm)?
Curated by Olia Lialina, net artist, professor of New Media and Post-Digital Cultures at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart; author of Digital Folklore, Turing Complete User and From My to Me.
