With works by: Cristian Anutoiu, Lea Gander, Jona Lingitz & Neptunia Monna Anarchus, Maximilian Prag, Lea-Maraike Sambale, freakygreenfish
Exhibition Design: Cristian Anutoiu
Curated by Martina Menegon
online exhibition
Transcendence: Beyond Bodies, Between Realities is part of the WRONG Biennale 2025/26, and marks the opening of the Transmedia Arts Department’s new online exhibition platform, dedicated to experimental digital practices and showcasing works by selected students.
To transcend is to move beyond, to shift across boundaries. From the Latin trans (beyond) and scandere (to climb), it suggests elevation, a movement past the limits of the physical, the known, the habitual. In this exhibition, transcendence becomes a speculative practice, a way of navigating between realities, bodies, and systems.
To transcend the body is to understand it as porous, layered, and in continuous transformation. Digital technologies reveal and amplify these shifts, making visible the ways in which identity, presence, and agency are always already hybrid, co-constructed, and distributed.
Intelligence too becomes increasingly hybrid, no longer confined to the boundaries of the human or the machine, but unfolding across networks, behaviors, and synthetic relations. In this expanded terrain, artificial intelligence becomes a condition, a texture, a force among others shaping how we sense, know, and become.
To transcend realities is to move through overlapping modes of being: physical and virtual, organic and synthetic, internal and networked. It is to sense the instability of orientation and to move through it with curiosity, friction, and care. Transcendence then becomes a way of inhabiting several states at once. It is a practice of living through multiplicity, of staying with contradictions, of becoming unruly.
Rather than tracing a single direction, the exhibition opens up a field of entangled movements: speculative re-morphing of body and technology, glitched presence, layered hybrid corporeality, bodily shattering and reassembly, bio-cybernetics, posthuman ecologies, distributed intelligence, soft interfaces, poetic resistance, and algorithmic critique.
The works in Transcendence: Beyond Bodies, Between Realities trace these movements through embodiment, glitch, wyrdness, softness and relation. Some confront algorithmic infrastructures directly, others move through quieter ecologies of perception. Together, they also operate within a broader landscape shaped by the cultural, conceptual, and emotional implications of AI, reflecting on a world where intelligence is not simply artificial or authentic, but synthetic, distributed, partial, and already embedded in the fractured realities we inhabit.
Here, transcendence unfolds relationally, through the spaces in between.
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ARTWORKS INFO:
Cristian Anutoiu
sh4*frgm
Video, [excerpt, w/o sound], 2023
Sculpture and spatiality are explored through video and the fractured language of digital image production. Central are questions of construction and deconstruction, and the ongoing negotiation of the bodies fragility, boundaries & integrity. Technology appears not only as a tool but as a co creator - it distorts, reframes, and reshapes, while the body simultaneously imprints itself on the technologies that capture it.
BIO: Cris Anutoiu (they/them) works across sculpture, video, and image-making to explore the fluid boundaries of the body. Their practice examines how technology reshapes embodiment and perception. Rooted in queer and transhuman research, they trace how bodies shift across digital and physical states. As a founding member of the intermedia collective room69, they employ experimental exhibition formats that challenge conventional spatial and narrative structures.
www.cristian-anutoiu.com | @b4cterija
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Maximilian Prag
who-will-suffice
AR animated avatar, 2022
By slightly transforming the skeleton in relation to its rigged body, the motion captured movement of the bipedal avatar becomes abstract and glitches its body in form, proportion and exaggerated movement. By reloading the site one of 5 avatars is randomly loaded and can be displayed in augmented reality. While the avatar and its animation stay the same, only the respective skeletons are offset or scaled in different directions.
BIO: Maximilian Prag (they/them, *1997, Linz, AT) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer testing contemporary visual and new media culture. They create new formats of digital representations, virtual worlds and hybrid installative experiences, inspired by internet culture (memes), posthuman research and material experimentation. Maximilian is a founding member of the artist-lead collective room69, as well as working for the Viennese Media Arts Festival CIVA since its conception.
maximilianprag.com | @maximilianprag
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Lea Gander
Cyborgs Bloom
Digital audiovisual installation, 2025
Rooted in the desire to connect with non-human beings, the seemingly fixed, separate, and independent individual becomes part of a symbiotic organism within an imagined landscape. Interspecies coexistence reveals networks of exchange and feedback, where intelligence is understood as distributed rather than centralized. Differentiation no longer signifies separation but growth and mutual reliance.Rather than confining non-human entities within predefined human frameworks, the recognition of multifaceted intelligences allows other worlds to expand our own.
BIO: Lea Gander (*2001, AT) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Vienna. Their artistic approach navigates questions of identity within shifting spatial and digital landscapes, as well as the interconnection of nature, human and technology. Through interdisciplinary forms of expression they invite the exploration of emotional landscapes characterized by connection.
www.leagander.com | @leagndr
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Lea-Maraike Sambale
Just because it doesn't have ears, doesn't mean that it's not listening
AR-Postcard Series, 2025
Flowers on postcards – imprints of memory, intimacy, and fleeting time. These motifs are digital collages, created from scanned textures of everyday surfaces. Each postcard carries a QR code that reveals an augmented reality object: floating, visible, softly unfolding in space.
How can we preserve the everyday?
How do objects and surfaces hold the traces of touch?
And what stories would they tell, if they could remember?
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Lea-Maraike Sambale
soften your vision
digital collage, 2024
soften your vision explores the interplay between rest and perception. A digitally assembled collage of organic and inorganic surface scans merges into landscape-like patterns, accompanied by a 17-minute audio piece in which a voice reflects on fatigue, distraction, and consumption. The work considers the tension between escaping productivity culture and embracing responsibility, presenting rest as essential for restoration, focus, and reciprocal engagement with the environment. Participants are invited to experience the elements through gentle attention, evoking the concept of soft fascination.
BIO: Lea-Maraike Sambale (she/her) is a Vienna-based transdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, new media, and performance. Her practice navigates tactile textures and digital spaces through installations, video works, and textiles, exploring touch, memory, and care in relation to technology and power structures. Trained as a physiotherapist, she has worked in art mediation (documenta fifteen) and currently manages communication and media content at Kunstverein DAS WEISSE HAUS.
www.leamaraikesambale.com | @leamaraike
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Jona Lingitz & Neptunia Monna Anarchu
Horsegirl/ I am Screaming & Horsegirl/ New Body
Animation Film. 2025
A girl with an elongated face stumbles through an absurdist plot. She ends up falling down the rabbit hole and shattering her body into pieces. Now she must regain what was lost but it will probably turn out different than she expected.
BIO: Jona Lingitz is an Austrian media artist from Graz with a background in animation and film production. His current practice mainly takes place in absurdist virtual worlds composed of various modular parts and characters. He is currently studying transmedia art with Jakob Lena Knebl at the University of Applied Arts.
BIO: Neptunia Monna Anarchus is a transmedia artist from rural Bulgaria. Her work consists mainly of sound design and music production with a focus on experimental and avant-garde textural pieces. In addition, her work also includes surrealistic body horror images, with which she deals with gender euphoria and dysphoria as a trans woman. She is currently studying transmedia art in Jakob Lena Knebl's She is currently studying transmedia art in Jakob Lena Knebl's class at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
www.jonalingitz.at | @schlingschwitz | @neptunia.monna.anarchus
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freakygreenfish
FrameTokCity vol 1.
Video Game, 2023
Social media platforms promised democratic public spaces but morphed into private enterprises controlling our communication. This web-based experience counters the disorienting endless scroll by transforming TikTok into a navigable 3D city, making the platform graspable on human scale. Visitors explore an urban district which was hit by censorship and how users respond to it through digital disobedience and trends as a new form of digital protest. Drawing on Generation Alpha's embrace of 3D avatars and pseudonyms, the work visualizes algorithm-driven content segmentation through "FrameTok"—using canvas frames as architectural elements to expose how platforms structure our social interactions. The endless scroll becomes a city you can walk through, revealing the power dynamics hidden in the interface.
BIO: Fish (*1999, Vienna, AT) grew up in a small town in Austria. There he went to an art high school. Since 2019 he has his own expanded definition of painting, in which everything out of linen and stretchers is one. Through performances, videos, traditional painting, CGI, and sculptures he is exploring and expanding the boundaries of his definition and social topics with a focus on left theories and social media.
Website / Social Media tags & links
@freakygreenfish