Exhibition Opening: From the Ashes of the Burnout Machines

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?

“From the ashes of the burnout machines” is an exhibition project that highlights how individuals, societies and the environment are exploited and “burned out” by, among other things, an extractive and profit-oriented model of digitalization.The exhibition approaches digitalization not as an abstract or immaterial force, but as a condition that permeates infrastructures, ecologies, and social life. Burnout becomes a diagnostic lens through which to understand the contemporary moment: a state produced by regimes of extraction, acceleration and exhaustion that operate simultaneously on bodies, environments and technological systems.

To articulate this condition, the exhibition unfolds through a series of interrelated clusters that trace the material, ecological, social and speculative dimensions of what can be called climate of burnout. These clusters are not discrete categories but overlapping fields of inquiry that reveal how digital infrastructures are embedded within broader political, economic, and environmental processes. Together, they challenge the dominant ideology of digitalization as frictionless progress, exposing instead its dependence on finite resources, invisible labor and uneven distributions of harm.