Reading digital traces: "Digital Traces" and UNESCO City of Media Arts at art karlsruhe 2026
With the special show “Digital Traces”, the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Collection is presenting an exhibition at art karlsruhe 2026 dedicated to the influence of digital technologies on contemporary artistic practice. Curated by Sarah Haberkorn, head of the LBBW Collection, the show brings together works that understand digitization not as a mere tool, but as a cultural reality that fundamentally changes perception, image production and authorship.
Learning to read digital tracks
Digital technologies are no longer a vision of the future, but a natural part of our everyday lives. They structure communication, influence the formation of political opinion, change work processes – and shape our visual cultures to an extent that has hardly been seen before. It is hardly surprising that contemporary art is reacting to these developments. It becomes exciting when it does not stop at illustrating the digital, but makes its logics, ruptures and ambivalences visible. This is precisely where the special exhibition “Digital Traces” at this year’s art karlsruhe comes in.
The exhibition presented by the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg Collection cannot be read as a technophile showcase of new media. Rather, it deals with a central question of our time: How is digitalization changing our understanding of images, authorship and reality? And what role do people still play in this process?
Between tool, world view and resistance
Digital transformation is no longer an abstract topic for the future, but a tangible part of social reality. This is precisely where “Digital Traces” picks up and opens up a differentiated view of digital technologies as a cultural practice. The works on display operate in a field of tension in which digital technologies are simultaneously a tool, a topic and a social reality.
It is less about the “newness” of the technology than about its consequences: about shifts in control and chance, about automated image production, about the question of who owns images and how meaning is created when algorithms help to shape them. Many of the participating artists do not treat digital systems as a black box. AI software, image generators or digital archives are exposed, questioned or deliberately aesthetically broken. This results in works that do not naturalize the digital, but rather make its conditions visible – including its errors, distortions and power structures.
Artistic positions between meme, material and algorithm
For example in the works of Avery Gia Sophie Schramm, in which digital image cultures are consistently transferred into painting and linked with questions of identity, body and self-staging. The seemingly smooth surfaces of Schramm’s works refer to social media, avatars and virtual spaces. They digitally condense memes, GIFs or logos into complex compositions and then transfer them to canvas in oil to materialize them in an almost old-masterly technique. The works thus consciously oppose the fleeting nature of virtual images and show how closely digital visual worlds are tied to desire, projections and power relations.
Decelerate digital images
Schramm describes this process as a balancing act between openness and responsibility: “I handle the digital images very freely, but this freedom is preceded by an intensive selection process. I’m interested in creating montages that I can’t interpret completely clearly myself, where responsibility arises not through explanation but through context. A broad spectrum appears in my works – from images that I am afraid of to those in which I see potential that has so far been under-recognized. I try not to reproduce problematic images, but to re-contextualize and deconstruct them.”
This attitude becomes particularly tangible in the transformation of digital imagery into painting. The logics and effects of digital images, their inscriptions of desire, projections and power relations, lose their apparent naturalness and become visible as constructions: “In the transformation of digital images into painting, something manifests itself for me that often remains difficult to grasp in the digital world. The effects of these images become tangible because they are translated into the analog world. This creates a different way of dealing with them – and the opportunity to negotiate them socially.”
Digital image processes in artistic dialog
Mary-Audrey Ramirez also works at the interface between analog and digital image production. In her works, computer-generated structures meet painterly or graphic interventions. The digital does not appear here as an immaterial sphere, but as a process that leaves traces – in forms, textures and breaks. It is precisely this hybridity that makes it clear that digital images are never created in isolation from material, historical and subjective conditions.
Manuel Graf and Andreas Greiner also represent positions that address the influence of algorithmic systems and data-based processes on our relationship to reality. Graf’s works deal with questions of temporality, simulation and images of the future, while Greiner often explores the interfaces between technology, nature and science. In both cases, it becomes clear that digitalization not only creates new visual worlds, but also shifts existing orders of knowledge, control and responsibility.
Digital visual worlds are not abstract spaces
A key added value of the exhibition lies in the fact that it consistently links digital image cultures back to social and biographical contexts. Memes, gaming aesthetics, AI images and digitized family archives do not appear here as neutral data, but as carriers of emotions, memories and political implications.
Especially at a time when AI-generated images can hardly be distinguished from those produced by humans, it becomes clear that the crucial question is not whether machines can generate images, but how humans select, contextualize, evaluate and process these images. “Digital Traces” shows art as a place where this responsibility is negotiated – beyond rapid technological exploitation logics.
Art as a guide in the digital age
What ultimately distinguishes the exhibition is its attitude. It refuses to provide simple answers and instead shows that artistic practice is not losing its relevance in the digital age, but is taking on new tasks. Art becomes a translator here. It makes abstract technological processes tangible and opens up spaces in which doubt, ambivalence and critical distance are permitted.
For visitors, this means that “Digital Traces” is not an exhibition that explains how digitization works. Rather, it invites visitors to read digital traces – in the image, in the material, in their own media consumption. And this is precisely where its added value lies: not in the spectacle, but in the lasting reflection.
Karlsruhe as a resonance space: UNESCO City of Media Arts at art karlsruhe
It is no coincidence that this special exhibition is being shown in Karlsruhe of all places. As a UNESCO City of Media Arts, the city has a long tradition at the interface of art, technology and social reflection. Institutions such as the ZKM contributed early on to understanding digital media not only as a technical innovation, but also as a cultural practice.
With the presence of the UNESCO City of Media Arts, this localization of content can be experienced spatially at art karlsruhe 2026. At the center of Hall 3 is “Soft Utopia”, a large-scale media art installation by the Karlsruhe collective Atelier B2. The work invites visitors not only to view digital spaces of the future, but also to physically experience them and use them together.
“Soft Utopia” as a walk-in future space
“Soft Utopia” is conceived as a walk-in media artwork that combines idealized ideas of future living spaces with a deliberately gentle, almost ironically positive view of our future coexistence. An organically shaped landscape made of textile upholstery envelops the visitors, while a luminous screen sky hovers above them, reacting sensitively to their movements. Architecture does not appear here as a rigid structure, but as a malleable, living counterpart.
As a project in the context of the UNESCO City of Media Arts and in partnership with karlsruhe.digital, “Soft Utopia” makes it possible to experience digitalization as a process that can be shaped. Digital technologies do not primarily serve to increase efficiency, but rather open up new forms of encounter, participation and urban coexistence. The installation combines digital media, architectural design and social issues to create a sensory experience that makes change, networking and collective design visible. “Soft Utopia” thus positions itself as a future-oriented art project in the trade fair context and underlines the claim not only to exhibit digital transformation, but to think – and experience it – together with the public.
art karlsruhe: A place for condensing content
Together, the accompanying exhibition “Digital Traces” and the presence of the UNESCO City of Media Arts at art karlsruhe show that digital transformation is more than just a technological process. It becomes visible here as a cultural task that affects perception, responsibility and design. Those who engage with it will encounter digitalization not as an abstract promise for the future, but as a lived, jointly malleable reality. This makes art karlsruhe not only a marketplace for contemporary art, but also a place for condensing content, an aspect that is by no means a matter of course at trade fairs.
Cover: Avery Gia Sophie Schramm | COMMUNION. THE FEMALE SEARCH FOR LOVE (Title bell hooks, Meme Comedy Cemetery, Offline-Dinosaur, Queer FLINTA* Doomer on Purple to Pink Light Tunnel Gradient with Shadows), 2022 © Courtesy the artist & Anton Janizewski, Berlin, Photo: Falk Messerschmidt