ONLINE LAUNCH of the 22nd Web Residencies projects

Ten years ago, in the first call for Web Residencies at Akademie Schloss Solitude, the collective NETRO posed a question that has lost none of its urgency: »Who wants to post stuff on the same platform as Donald Trump?«

For the tenth anniversary of the Web Residencies program, Akademie Schloss Solitude returns to this question, asking where and how we can meet online when digital platforms are monopolized, surveillance-driven, and increasingly weaponized.

Together with !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Web Residencies Call No. 22 invited artists, technologists, and researchers to challenge extractive digital platforms and AI systems. Over four weeks of online residency, the six selected Web Residents have developed projects that interfere with the infrastructures shaping our digital lives – from manipulating search engines and scrambling text to exposing hidden data extraction and reclaiming spaces for human connection.

What happens when we refuse to play by the rules of the platforms we inhabit?
The collective automatonomy.net makes website text legible to humans but unreadable to AI scrapers, while Olivier Jonvaux turns the invisible activity of AI crawlers into visible swarms of digital flies. Herdimas Anggara multiplies misspellings of his own name to disrupt the authoritative identities produced by search engines and AI summaries. Lucia Rebolino traces the colonial, economic, and environmental power relations concealed behind domain endings such as .ai, .io, and .tv. Tara Kelton repurposes delivery apps to bring gig workers and customers together for brief encounters around food and conversation. And Mahoutondji Kinmagbo draws on the knowledge protocols of the Luba Lukasa memory board to challenge AI’s demand for unrestricted access, exploring how partial disclosure and opacity can become forms of agency.

Moving between code, cartography, social choreography, and cultural memory, the six projects propose ways to interrupt dominant technological logics rather than comply with them. They make visible what platforms conceal, illegible what machines seek to extract, and social what digital infrastructures often keep apart.

Ten years after the question was first posed, join us to explore how we might inhabit the internet differently: by disrupting its established rules, finding unexpected connections, and imagining spaces beyond the platforms that dominate our lives.

With the Web Residents:
Herdimas Anggara, Richmond/USA; automatonomy.net, Prague/Czech Republic; Olivier Jonvaux, Paris/France; Tara Kelton, Bangalore/India; Mahoutondji Kinmagbo, Cotonou/Benin; Lucia Rebolino, London/UK