Find out about upcoming Web Residencies via the Digital Solitude newsletter

Web Residencies

by Akademie Schloss Solitude

The Web Residencies program was initiated by Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2016 to support young talents from the international digital scene as well as artists of all disciplines who deal with web-based practices to present the process and results of their work online.

Akademie Schloss Solitude launches several calls for Web Residencies a year. Artists are invited to experiment with digital technologies and new art forms, and reflect on the topics set by the curators or curatorial collectives. Artists are rewarded with a four to eight weeks residency and 1200 Euro.

In the years 2017–2020, Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM | Center for Art and Media have announced in cooperation nine calls for web residencies with different topics that were designed by invited curators. In the years 2018 and 2020, the production prize »Hash« was awarded for outstanding projects by the Web Residents. The price is being sponsored by the Stiftung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg.

Find out more about the Digital Solitude program and subscribe to the Digital Solitude newsletter to receive the latest calls and news. An overview of all projects and interviews can be found at: https://webresidencies.akademie-solitude.de

Calls 2023

Curated by Digital Solitude and Liquid Architecture

Algorithmic Poetry.

For the nineteenth call for web residencies, Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Digital Solitude program collaborated closely with Liquid Architecture. The Naarm (Melbourne)–-based art organization Liquid Architecture supports radical interdisciplinary experimentations offering a platform for artists working with sound.
The six works that have been created during the web residency »Algorithmic Poetry.« engage critically, poetically and playfully with sound and our everyday data-driven world. Through the use of sound, listening and/or recording practices, the works expand the notion of algorithms and the ways in which data sets are managed and information is gathered. An echo of technological implementation, experimentation with »slippages«, »in-betweens«, »negative spaces«, »crafting and glitching«, and »embodiment of words« is the through-line of the works.
Featuring work by Bola Chinelo, Moritz Nahold and Kenneth Constance Loe, kirby, Sherese Francis, Fileona Dkhar, Shamica Ruddock and Hannan Jones.

Calls 2022

Curated by Research Netting Group, Akademie Schloss Solitude in cooperation with SAVVY Contemporary

Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience

In the framework of the project Magical Hackerism or The Elasticity of Resilience, SAVVY Contemporary and Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Digital program offer four web residencies to practitioners and communities within the tropical belt, exploring situated knowledges, forming local DIT (Do It Together) community networks, and/or connecting intertropically on a planetary level.

Calls 2021

Curated for dgtl fmnsm

Undesired by the Market: Resting!

With the 17th Call for Web Residencies by Solitude, curated by Sarah Fartuun Heinze, Andara Shastika, Franziska Goralski and Ulla Heinrich for dgtl fmnsm, artists are invited to experience, explore and enjoy taking a restful break in a utopian space of possibility from an intersectional and queer feminist perspective. Because the radical break – whether in the form of creative freedom in the context of a virtual artist residency or a self-chosen sabbatical – is, above all, one thing: a space of possibility.

Curated by Anca Rujoiu

Solidarity is a verb

With this call, curated by Anca Rujoiu, Akademie Schloss Solitude together with ARC Bucharest invites artists and collectives, to foreground the relational quality of solidarity, its ability to articulate politics and construct collective agency as a necessity of now. With »Solidarity is a verb« we strongly encourage practitioners to imagine ways of negotiating distance and proximity, and shaping a continuous production of relation grounded on common differences. While projects can inhabit the web as a space to practice solidarity, this open call encourages in equal manner initiatives that unfold on a local or translocal dimension beyond the screen.

The project is co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund of Romania (AFCN)

Call for the Web Residency »Solidarity is a verb«, 2021. Graphic design by Anne Lippert and Stephan Thiel

Curated by Mutations Research Group

Mutations

Akademie Schloss Solitude's Call for Web Residencies No. 15 is curated by Mutations Research Group. »Mutations« is the Akademie's first thematic and collective residency. Seven fellows representing a variety of artistic and interdisciplinary backgrounds were selected due to their interests that expand mutation beyond bounded interpretations of biological structures and systems. As a part of this group, Grayson Earle (USA/Germany), Ana María Gómez López (Colombia/USA/Netherlands), and Joana Quiroga (Brazil) are the curators of this Call for Web Residencies No. 15. The goal of the »Mutations« web residency is to engage artist collectives working on the heterogenous theme of mutations – biological, sociopolitical, technological – in relation to the global digital divide. We aim to support artists, programmers, hacktivists, researchers, and other practitioners that offer mutations to the aesthetic and political underpinning of digital and internet-based art.

Calls 2020

Curated by Johanna Hedva

Post-Doom

For Akademie Schloss Solitude’s Call for Web Residencies No. 14, we invited artist and musician Johanna Hedva as curator. Moving away from all-encompassing dystopian future scenarios, »Post-Doom« explores how the perception of a lost present is inscribed in and reproduced in our everyday experiential spaces. As a seductive counterpart to this seemingly hopeless approaching terminal sate (or standstill), Hedva calls for us to rethink beginnings, new multiple entry points, and experiences that reveal the longing for a whole, unmediated potential of our present and future.

Curated by Violet Natume

Muntu Maxims

We invite artists, collectives, experts, and activists from all disciplines to dedicate themselves to an experimental publishing practice through a Web Residency. With this call, we intend to bring together different areas of spirituality from cultures all over the world, and to highlight selected examples online. The project seeks to reflect on the socio-psychological position with regard to facts or states of affairs that indicate Muntu’s dependence on other dynamisms in things, people, and the supernatural.

Calls 2019

Curated by Daphne Dragona

Engineering Care

Under the title of »Engineering Care«, the call No. 8 for Web Residencies by Solitude & ZKM looked into automated care’s possibilities and limitations, gains and losses. Curator Daphne Dragona invited artists, designers, technologists, and activists to submit proposals for new or ongoing works that capture how we will live and work with machines, and how relationships and dependencies might change. Challenging the common narratives about artificial empathy and the robotic imaginary, it welcomes projects that address care’s economization and instrumentalization, or shed light on forms of radical, collective, and critical care.

Curated by Jonas Lund

Rigged Systems

The Web Residencies call No. 7, »Rigged Systems« inspired more than 160 artists, designers, and activists from around the globe to submit their projects. Curated by Jonas Lund, the call asked for projects that aim to subvert the power structures in contemporary network systems and that wish to reclaim a sense of agency within the systems where it feels like there is none left. Proposals that playfully rethink the political power balance, imagine new ways of circumventing censorship, or build alternative networks to corporate-owned infrastructures are among the four selected submissions for the web residencies by Solitude & ZKM.

Curated by Dani Ploeger

Violent Consumer Media

The ninth call for Web Residencies by Schloss Solitude and ZKM, »Violent Consumer Media,« seeked to explore how consumer technologies and user-generated online content affect both the representation and performance of violence. Curator Dani Ploeger invited artists, designers, technologists, and activists to engage with the role of mobile phones, action cameras, toy drones and other digital gadgets in warfare, terrorism, hunting, and other forms of subjective violence.

Calls 2018

Curated by Tegan Bristow

Ghosted 2018

Where are the transformational archives of the South; bringing ghosted cultures to the fore? Where are the break-up letters for the Western digital world? For the Web Residencies call No. 4 by Solitude and ZKM on the topic »Ghosted (2018)« curator Tegan Bristow from Johannesburg/South Africa invited artists, hackers, visual and audio makers, subaltern archivists and southern healers for creative and artistic practices on non-Western explorations of cultural capital.

Curated by Mary Maggic

Planetary Glitch

Against the background of climate change, rising sea-levels and the chemical alteration and industrialization of the planet, this call asked for new open–source strategies for undoing the trap of this planetary shift. Curator and juror Mary Maggic invited artists, designers, (bio)hackers, technologists, storytellers, writers, healers and shape-shifters to hand in pleasure tutorials, witchcraft and alchemy, collective coping mechanisms, online networks of care, information emancipation, training exercises, and other formats.

Refiguring the Feminist Future

This was a call for »the female future«. The feminism that is more than women; it is a philosophy of non-male, non-cis, non-white, non-western. For the Web Residencies call No. 5 by Solitude and ZKM on the topic »Refiguring the Feminist Future«, curator Morehshin Allahyari invited artists, activists, poets, writers, feminists, and dreamers for challenging existing histories and speculative futures through storytelling and counter narrative imagining using web as their platform. Over 190 artists submitted ideas, four were chosen for web residencies.

Morehshin Allahyari, What does »the future is female« actually look like? Four artists will find out for the web residencies by Solitude & ZKM, curated by Morehshin Allahyari, »Refiguring the Feminist Future«, 2018

Calls 2017

Curated by Nora O Murchú

An AI Summer

The Web Residencies call No. 3, 2017 by Solitude and ZKM on the topic »An AI Summer« is curated by Nora O Murchú, who invited artists from all disciplines to address AI as a topic or employ AI methods in the creation of their work. 110 applicants took part in the call, four web residents were chosen from a shortlist of 9 proposals. The web residents will work on their ideas during the month of November. The projects will be shown on Schlosspost as well as on the ZKM website.

Curated by Claudia Maté

Fractal Horses

The Web Residencies call No. 2, 2017 by Solitude and ZKM on the topic »Fractal Horses« was curated by net artist Claudia Maté, who invited artists of all disciplines to challenge the complexity and tensions of patterns and chaos. 100 applicants took part in the call, four web residents were chosen from a shortlist of 16 proposals. The web residents will work on their projects for four weeks (until August 3, 2017), posting articles and works regularly or reporting on the steps to their final piece. The projects will be shown on Schlosspost as well as on the ZKM website.

Curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli

Blowing the Whistle, Questioning Evidence

For the call on the topic »Blowing the Whistle, Questioning Evidence«, announced in February 2017 by Solitude & ZKM, the curator and juror Tatiana Bazzichelli invited artists, hackers, technologic experts, computer scientists and activists who have been working actively on the topic of truth-telling, leaking, and counter-surveillance, with the aim of exposing misconducts and wrongdoings to participate. 65 applicants took part in the call, four web residents were chosen from a shortlist of ten proposals. The web residents worked on their projects for four weeks (until April 20, 2017), posting articles regularly or reporting on the steps to their final piece. Projects were shown on Schlosspost as well as on the ZKM website.

Calls 2016

Curated by Apparatus 22

SUPRAINFINIT: L'Avenir Redux

»Hope is the new oxygen!« For the third call for Web Residencies in September 2016, the curators and jurors Apparatus 22 invited all creatives to contribute to the expansion of the SUPRAINFINIT universe. The call welcomed ideas, fantasies, and manifestoes for rituals, dreams, exchanges, objects, energies, knowledge and new words for »other futures.« 117 applicants from around the world took part in the call. This time, four web residents instead of three were chosen from a shortlist of 13 proposals.

Curated by Mario Doulis

Re-entering the Ultimate Display

For the second call for Web Residencies in April/May 2016, the curator and juror Mario Doulis invited (digital) artists and scientists to revisit cyberspace and share their virtual reality wonderlands, dream sculptures, and marketplaces for lost memories. The call welcomed all kinds of VR projects dealing with the topic »Re-entering the Ultimate Display« to participate. 65 applicants from everywhere from Argentina to Estonia took part in the call. Three web residents were chosen from a shortlist of 16 teams and people.

Curated by NETRO

Decentralization of Internet Art

»Who wants to post stuff on the same platform as Donald Trump?« For the first call for Web Residencies in February 2016, the curators and jurors NETRO were looking for web installations, web performances, or web sculptures which deal with the topic »Decentralization of Internet Art.« Applicants were asked to hand in a concept text, clickbait headline, and header picture. Eighty-four applicants took part in the call, three web residents were chosen from a shortlist of 14 people and teams.