In Touch: How to Connect in the Age of Digital Humanity?

Mar 22-Jun 16, 2024
IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture, Utrecht

Through smartphones and social media, we are promised that staying in touch is easier than ever. Everyone is only a click away—from close friends to distant strangers—yet many of us feel lonelier and more disconnected than before. The exhibition In Touch asks what it really means to connect in an age when intimacy, identity, and even empathy are filtered through digital devices.

Set against the backdrop of today’s screen-saturated culture, the exhibition brings together international artists who reflect on how technology reshapes human and non-human relationships alike. From AI-driven conversations to hybrid performances, the works open up playful, poetic, and critical encounters with the infrastructures that shape our daily lives.

Among the participating artists, Nadja Verena Marcin presents her project #SOPHYGRAY, a feminist AI chat bot, inviting visitors to “speak feminism” to artificial intelligence, Marcin exposes both the possibilities and the biases of machine learning. By engaging directly with audiences, her work turns questions of gender, language, and power into lived experiences—revealing how digital systems quietly rewrite the way we connect.

Curated by Daniela Tenenbaum, In Touch also features works by Studio Above&Below, Paula Nishijima, Me AndOther Me, and T(N)C. Together they transform the IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture in Utrecht into a testing ground for new relational landscapes, where technology is not only a tool of communication, but also a stage for reimagining intimacy, presence, and community.