FIXTURES #4 – Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder in conversation with Kevin Rittberger / Embodied data and planetary thinking on April 28th, 2025

Pranayama-Praktizierende mit Smart Ring | Fotocredits: © Cornelia Sollfrank/Felix Stalder

Pranayama-Praktizierende mit Smart Ring | © Cornelia Sollfrank & Felix Stalder

The event will be held in German and English.

This is a link where you can find the documentation about the event on 28.04.2025 on the webpage of Zurich University of the Arts.

We are delighted to welcome three guests to the fourth Jour Fixe of the Media Workshop: Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder will speak at FIXTURES #4 about the contemporary in embodied data practices and its relation to the planetary. The occasion is the publication of their new book Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices, published in the series The Contemporary Condition by Sternberg Press.

Kevin Rittberger will moderate the dialogue and lead it into a general discussion.

Cornelia Sollfrank und Felix Stalder,
Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices,
in der Reihe The Contemporary Condition
(Hrsg. Geoff Cox, Jacob Lund und Nicolas Malevé),
Sternberg Press, 2025

The starting point for the discussion are two artistic field studies: Breathing Data by Cornelia Sollfrank and Infrastructure of a migratory bird by Felix Stalder and Gordan Savicic. Both projects use sensors and trackers to collect data from living beings: on the one hand, body-related data from the researcher and on the other, geo-location data from migratory birds. This raises the question of what parallels there might be between a human pranayama practitioner and a migratory bird in this datafied environment.

For their dialogue-based reflection, Sollfrank and Stalder draw on different temporalities and interweave them into a planetary perspective. They move through lived, historical, evolutionary and technological rhythms, unfolding their respective more-than-human frames of reference to ultimately arrive at their specific form of action in the present moment.

The two projects were part of the artistic research project Latent Spaces at the Zurich University of the Arts (2022-2024): https://latentspaces.zhdk.ch/

@ Vladan Joler, Gordan Savičić and Felix Stalder.
Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird (2024) (Ausschnitt)

Cornelia Sollfrank (Berlin)
is an artist, researcher and author who has been working on critical digital practice since the mid-1990s.

Felix Stalder (Wien/Zürich)
is a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts and researches digital culture.

Kevin Rittberger (Berlin)
is a playwright and theater director and researches the rights of nature and communication between species.