In Terms of Media…

Lore, Noise, Sense, and Air

Photo Credit: Aura Satz, Preemptive Listening, Still

Presented by The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures

Our present is shaped not only by visible architectures of data and computation, but also by registers that precede or exceed explicit discourse:

the mythological and occult substrates through which technological imaginaries take hold;
the noise from which systems, meanings, and exclusions emerge;
the conditions of mediated life and their entanglement with colonial histories of power and sensing;
the atmospheric environments that orient conduct and produce consent without explicit command.

What are the terms under which media acts through lore, noise, sense, and air?

With its second instalment, the In Terms of Media… symposium continues the Weibel Institute for Digital Culture's ongoing engagement with contemporary media technologies.

With: Elisa Balmaceda, Josephine Berry, Anna Engelhardt, Sonia de Jager, Miguel Prado Casanova, Patricia Reed, Aura Satz, Valentina Tanni, Jamieson Webster, Günseli Yalcinkaya, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Jesse Damiani

Across four panels and one workshop, the symposium brings together artists, theorists, and practitioners to trace these registers from multiple angles, attending to the historical conditions from which our present has emerged and the alternative practices it might yet generate.

Full programme:

5 November
15:00–16:30
Lore
This panel approaches technoculture as a myth-making machine, tracing how narratives and aesthetics coalesce into speculative folklore that shapes how technology is imagined. Folklore is understood as a form of situated knowledge-making that emerges when systems exceed legibility, with users and platforms alike taking part in its production, from vernacular sense-making to strategic self-mythologizing.
With Günseli Yalcinkaya, Valentina Tanni, Gary Zhexi Zhang. Moderation: Sophie Publig

17:00–18:30
Noise
Noise is not merely the negation or an obstruction of meanings. In a more productive sense, the complexity of the term might be considered as the condition from which systems, meanings, and materialities become possible precisely through their exposure to friction and interference as an onto-epistemological condition. This panel considers what it means to think from within indeterminacy rather than simply against it.
With Sonia de Jager, Miguel Prado Casanova, Patricia Reed. Moderation: Mikkel Rørbo

6 November
15:00–16:30
Sense
As networks of sensors and surveillance expand in service of a technocratic global order, the panel asks what it might mean for artistic practices to reorient sensing as tender, slow, and situated. Gathering artists and theorists attending to listening, vibration, touch, and embodied sensation, the panel moves between the biopolitics of sound, colonial histories embedded in aesthetic regimes, and epistemologies emerging from feminist, decolonial, and more-than-human practices — foregrounding resonance, tenderness, and grounded ecological entanglement, while accounting for turbulences.
With Elisa Balmaceda, Josephine Berry, Aura Satz. Moderation: Denise Helene Sumi

17:00–18:30
Air
Taking air as medium, chemical agent, and social field, this panel asks how atmospheres are engineered to produce orientation, alignment, and consent without explicit command. Atmospheric governance operates not through declaration but by conditioning the environment in which certain thoughts, affects, and decisions become thinkable and others do not. Bringing together artists and researchers working across material, perceptual, and geopolitical registers, the panel asks what it means to think and act politically through and against air.
With Anna Engelhardt, Jamieson Webster. Moderation: Asia Bazdyrieva, Naoki Matsuyama

Additional programme (not at AIL):
4 Nov
10:00–16:00
at Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna

Futures of the Self
Workshop with Jesse Damiani
Please register for the workshop via this mail to: weibel.institute@uni-ak.ac.at
A participatory futures workshop that investigates how networked life, algorithmic culture, and the interdependent elements of the polycrisis are shaping the evolution of selfhood. The workshop takes as given the notion, that the self is formed through continuous relation and response to one’s sociotemporal context. The contemporary digital milieu is a mesh of language, performance, data systems, infrastructures, and incentives; though we each commonly experience ourselves as individuals, we construct distinct performances across platforms, and simultaneously exist as myriad ‘dividual’ coordinates (e.g., histories, locations, actions, inferred predictions). AI and surveillance technologies progress rapidly alongside the entangled crises of climate change, inequality, and (geo)political instability, disrupting the inherited status quo of the neoliberal ‘rules-based order.’ Whether our futures prove dystopian, utopian, or something stranger, what visions of the self can we imagine in 2046? Will the consensus understanding of ‘the self’ mean something radically different by then? What strategies might we adopt to advance prosocial, posthuman futurity? Building on the themes of In Terms of Media… 2026, participants will learn foresight methodologies including horizon scanning, Causal Layered Analysis, and Strategic World building, and apply them collaboratively to sketch possible futures.

4 November
18:00
at Mumok, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna

Screening: PREEMPTIVE LISTENING
A film by Aura Satz
In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 contemporary musicians form a resonant voice to ask: Does an alarm have to be alarming?

zur Übersicht

Photo Credit: Aura Satz, Preemptive Listening, Still

Symposium

Workshop

04. November 2026, 10:00 - 16:00

Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, Raum 9, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Wien

Screening

04. November 2026, 18:00

Mumok, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

Symposium

05. November 2026, 15:00 - 18:30

Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Wien

Symposium

06. November 2026, 15:00 - 18:30

Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Wien

LV Online (Base)