As part of the LINZ FMR Festival 2026, students from the Department of Sculptural Conceptions / Ceramics, together with Sarah Decristoforo, developed site-specific works at Schlossberg in Linz. Situated within the festival’s thematic fields – Digital Afterlife, Future Archaeology and Digital Artefacts, AI Societies, Power Structures and Resistance, Digital Declaration, and Isolation and the New Idyll – the works inscribe themselves into the site as open-ended questions.
Caroline Lerbros’ By continuing, you agree to terms and conditions introduces a precise intervention into the existing structure of a viewing platform. A temporary blue net traces the geometry of the platform, subtly altering the logic of movement. The paths remain accessible, yet their assumed clarity is disrupted: orientation no longer appears as a neutral act of navigation, but as an ongoing negotiation between visibility, control, and potential guidance.
The disruption of fixed spatial structures continues in Sonnhild Essl’s Signal Drifting as an open-ended process. Pink-pigmented chalk powder is applied to the ground using stencils, forming circular areas deliberately designed to dissolve over time. Wind, weather, and the movement of visitors become active parameters within an open system. Rather than creating a fixed mapping, the work produces a temporary cartography that continuously rewrites itself – and in doing so, maintains its own form of legibility.
Mani Ramhormozihoseinizadeh’s Elsewhere shifts the focus towards the entanglement of urban space and perception. Installed at eye level along the balustrade of a tower platform, a transparent, laser-cut Plexiglas form acts as an additional visual layer superimposed onto the view of the city. Oscillating between smoke cloud, organic growth, and abstract event, the form resists a single interpretation. Instead, it preserves a state of simultaneity in which media-generated imagery, global crisis narratives, and local perception no longer appear as separate phenomena, but become experienced as overlapping realities.
Ivy Deacon’s Soft Cruising also intervenes in spatial and social structures by making Schlossberg legible as a space of situated, bodily practices. Metallic circles distributed throughout the site carry engravings, text fragments, and drawings that function as markers of queer spatial appropriation. Cruising is not represented here, but spatially activated – as a practice that does not merely occupy public space, but subtly disrupts, shifts, and inscribes alternative forms of presence and resistance into its existing orders.
Yao Wang’s Picnic Vista™ transfers this dynamic into a deliberately hyper-aestheticized present situated between everyday life and interface. Functional picnic blankets, permeated by the visual language of Frutiger Aero and fragmented texts from the artist’s ongoing text-based practice, make use itself a constitutive element of the work. Schlossberg becomes a scenario in which leisure, digital aesthetics, and narrative layers cannot be separated, but instead merge and transform into one another.
Another form of speculative materiality emerges in Magdalena Berger’s untitled (silicon wally). Used digital storage devices – USB sticks, SD cards, and microSD cards – are embedded in resin and integrated into the historic Schlossberg wall. The work relocates contemporary data carriers into an archaeologically readable material context, creating a peculiar temporal fold: technologies of the present appear already as relics of the future.
Louisa Roubik’s Average-Sized Rabbit Hole moves in a different atmospheric and media-related direction. Beneath a tree, a semi-transparent, tubular structure functions as a temporary interface within the landscape. Projections of GIFs, images, and text fragments form a shifting collage that is continuously updated through performances. Between installation, feed, and situational space, the work creates a place where digital image circulation becomes physical and translates itself into a fragile present.
Between future fossils, fleeting encounters, global image spaces, and evolving traces, the works unfold diverse perspectives on a digitally shaped present. Bound to their respective spatial and material conditions, they only fully emerge through movement, use, and perception. Perhaps this is their shared quality: they remain fluid – suspended between material, space, and the people who encounter them.
