Programme 2026

For its 2026 edition, AMRO presents Becoming Unreadable at Splace, a showcase in which participating artists engage with strategies of invisibility, unreadability, and digital self-determination as critical responses to the hyper-visibility enforced by AI systems and the growing alliance between big tech and conservative politics.

In a world of social bubbles, immediate gratification and geopolitical upheaval, sound in art can help establish new ways of acknowledging the ‘other’, a first step towards a renewed mutuality. In this talk, Marco will focus on his latest series of works, I Am Your Body, an ongoing collection of performances and installations that leverage participative research on Deaf perception of sound as a means for new artistic aesthetics. Computational and prosthetic technology plays a crucial role in these works, but rather than being passive media, they are subverted and transformed into machines that act as new organs for a shared perception.

Pirouette Machines. Fluid Components: This lecture follows the path of an ex-ballerina through fluid computers, handmade semiconductors, and cosmetic synthesisers. We will tackle the seductive side and hidden narratives of circuitry to natural systems, salty fluids, and minerals and discuss the importance of alternative hardware morphologies.

Eleven international artistic positions address the ecological and social impacts of an extractive, profit-driven model of digitalisation, and illuminate the close entanglement of the climate and technology crises. Burnout not only settles in the individual body as a state of exhaustion, but it also accumulates, circulates and disperses into a shared climate that stretches across technical systems, social relations and ecological processes. What happens at the margins of exhaustion, where systems falter or refuse to fully cohere? Could spaces emerge for tentative forms of connection, alternative rhythms and practices that do not reproduce the extractive logic of burnout?

Welcome to AMRO26!

When light meets a dense surface it stops, and when a word meets a machine, it is rendered mute.

Rethinking the Technosphere Along the Lines of Repair and Maintenance Work: According to Jackson’s Rethinking Repair, breakdown, maintenance, and repair constitute crucial but vastly understudied sites or moments within the worlds of new media and technology today. Repair is a side or moment of technological life that goes, for the most part, unrecognised.

During the activation, visitors encounter a masked performer sitting among the plinths. Donning a ceremonial eyeless mask resembling the organs and wearing a biosensor on its heart, the creature seeks the visitors’ touch. As their hands meet, the organs transmit live sounds from the creature’s body into the visitor’s. As subtle hand contact unfolds a micro-choreography of closeness, their bodies merge in a poetic suspension.