The online exhibition Molecular Minds // Monstrous Matters brings together the works of six artists and Akademie Schloss Solitude alumni. Their contributions question and critically engage with heteronormative worldviews around consciousness research, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and self-experience. The poetic interventions speak about mechanisms of power, exclusion, and oppression encoded into the very concepts underpinning digital technologies. Yet they equally mobilize the digital medium to propose alternative visions for shared futures that are not exclusively white or Western.

Like a networked mind, the show unfolds amid several nodes of access by expanding from its own online space to the show Mind Over Matter at the Technische Sammlungen Dresden. As such, the works explore the concerns of the exhibition curated by Netzwerk Medien Kunst Dresden from a speculative, feminist, and decolonial point of view.

The artists of Molecular Minds // Monstrous Matters probe the power of a collective intelligence that reaches from the enhanced to the monstrous, the ancestral to the futurist, the molecular to the planetary, and from the human to the non-human. With creativity and visionary fuel, they unlock the digital realm as a space that comes with response-ability – the ability to respond to its architectures of power and to think with, to care for those it chooses to forget, erase, and leave behind.

With Nora Al-Badri, Johanna Bruckner, Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism), Jan Nikolai Nelles, Miriam Simun & Natasha Tontey

Curated by Mara-Johanna Kölmel for the program Digital Solitude by Akademie Schloss Solitude

Online space by parmon

Design by Stephan Thiel and Anne Lippert

»A Scattering of Spiral and Elliptical Galaxies« Sound by Lamin Fofana

Exhibition architecture by Atelier Adhoc Arhitectura (George Marinescu & Maria Daria Oancea)

Special thanks to Thomas Dumke, Denise Sumi, Andreas Ullrich, and the teams at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and Technische Sammlungen Dresden