contact: mail <at> geraldnestler <net>
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
I am an artist and researcher who makes use of and combines installation, video, performance, intervention, graphics, sound, speech, and lyrics with theory, conversation and writing. I also realize and curate postdisciplinary formats that bring together art, theory, science and other fields of experience and knowledge, such as the art series The Future of Demonstration. My practice is to a large extent engaged in thinking, working and making together, amongst many others with the artist Sylvia Eckermann and the Technopolitics working group.
I graduated from the Academy of fine arts Vienna and hold a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, where I was a researcher at Forensic Architecture.
In my artistic, postdisciplinary research, I focus on three interconnected themes:
the derivative condition argues that in technocapitalism the power to claim the future derives from displacing accustomed representational functions with performative modes that turn each promise into a (contingent) claim, each potential into a (fungible) option and each value into price. Its data-driven models, technologies, operations, and narratives are put to task to produce leverage from all the volatilities that emerge and collide in the vast spaces of socio-ecological contingency. This global hypercompetition results in a social asset class system in which the "1%" of the leverage class exploit-control the different tiers of the debt classes, which in its lowest segments also include non-human worlds.
aesthetics of resolution is a concept and toolbox to activate resistance and re-claim agency against the asymmetries of the derivative condition by employing the entire semiotic field of the term resolution to turn transparency from a passive democratic promise into a vibrant and open ecology of more-than-human communication.
renegade activism investigates agency as a risk sharing practice. It is based on the premise that in the age of corprorate AI and proprietary algorithmic power resistance needs to transform from the paradigm of critique/dissent towards systemic betrayal and insurrection. Solidarity here describes the necessity to act against injustices on social, political and ecological levels, either by rising up and fighting back as system renegades or by supporting those who do.