Nadim Samman has carved out a unique niche over the past decade as a curator and thinker operating at the intricate crossroads of contemporary art, technology, and digital culture. His academic background, steeped in philosophy from University College London and further honed with a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, equips him with a deep theoretical lens to interpret how technological shifts reshape our cultural landscape. Particularly active in the vibrant art scenes of Berlin and Vienna, Samman’s curatorial endeavors probe the impact of emergent digital phenomena—artificial intelligence, big data, encryption, and systemic collapse—on how art is created, experienced, and understood in the 21st century.
Samman’s 2023 publication, *Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene*, together with its companion exhibition at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art, encapsulates a decade-long exploration of the evolving effects of digital technologies. This body of work centers on how artists grapple with the dehumanizing and alienating consequences of living amid pervasive digital infrastructures. Encryption, secrecy, datafication, and trust emerge as potent themes within what Samman frames as the Technocene—the current era shaped by technological dominance and complexity. These inquiries extend beyond art’s confines, touching broader social and cultural questions about the increasingly blurred boundaries between reality and simulation.
At the heart of *Poetics of Encryption* is a compelling redefinition of encryption itself. Traditionally, encryption serves the narrow function of securing digital data against unwanted access. Samman and the featured artists, however, treat encryption as a multifaceted poetic and critical device—an aesthetic and conceptual tool that reveals hidden layers of meaning beneath the surface of our technologically mediated lives. Encryption becomes a metaphor for opacity and secrecy, highlighting the concealed “bodies” of knowledge and power that operate within mass surveillance regimes and algorithmic governance. This shift prompts a reconsideration of how transparency is fetishized in digital culture, encouraging instead an embrace of ambiguity, cryptic forms, and the limits of knowledge.
The exhibition and book challenge mainstream narratives of technology as neutral or inherently progressive tools. Instead, they illuminate how technology deeply modulates human identity, social relations, and perception of reality. By celebrating artistic interventions that highlight these opacities—through cryptic aesthetics and disruption of straightforward interpretation—Samman encourages viewers to critically engage with our digital condition rather than passively consume sanitized versions of it. Encryption, in this frame, is not merely a concealment strategy but becomes fertile ground for creative expression and reflection.
Beyond encryption, Samman’s curatorial vision also grapples with the impact of artificial intelligence and the precariousness of digital systems. His projects such as the “Vienna Digital Cultures” festival themed *Model Collapse* (2025) investigate how AI, mass datafication, and algorithmic breakdowns disrupt and reshape cultural production and curatorship itself. By foregrounding concepts such as collapse and failure—typically seen as undesirable—Samman flips the script to view them as essential components for understanding technological transformations. These moments of glitch, error, and system failure serve as generative forces that challenge the prevailing narratives of relentless progress and orderly control.
This perspective holds significant ethical and existential weight in today’s increasingly automated and data-driven world, where reliance on digital infrastructures exposes vulnerabilities and social alienation. Samman’s work pushes cultural institutions and audiences alike to confront these challenges honestly, encouraging a broader reflection on the intricate entanglement between humans and technology. Artistic responses to AI and systemic instability become sites for imagining alternative futures and modes of resistance against the reductive logics of datafication.
Perhaps one of Samman’s most innovative contributions lies in how he rethinks curatorial practice itself for the digital age. Recognizing that planetary digital infrastructures transcend traditional museum boundaries and reshape audience interaction, he advocates for “inter-site specificity.” This concept involves moving beyond single physical galleries toward hybrid formats, networked collaborations, and interdisciplinary engagements that account for the dispersed, multi-sited realities of contemporary digital culture. His role in initiating the Antarctic Biennale and numerous international projects illustrates his commitment to experimental curatorial forms that resist conventional institutional limitations.
In addition, Samman situates curatorial work within wider cultural and political frameworks, notably through initiatives like the Autotelic Foundation. These efforts create spaces for art’s autonomous potential amid turbulent technological shifts, especially in an era of “total datafication,” where every aspect of existence is quantified and algorithmically managed. Such conditions spawn “monsters” in the form of distorted realities where lines between fact and fiction blur. Through these platforms, Samman explores how art can mediate these conditions—resisting commodification, embracing ambiguity, and fostering new critical sensibilities attuned to complexity.
Ultimately, Nadim Samman’s work illuminates the profound and often unsettling ways technological systems permeate our cultural fabric. Through *Poetics of Encryption* and his broader curatorial philosophy, he offers a nuanced framework for understanding how encryption functions both literally and metaphorically in contemporary art. He urges a reckoning with artificial intelligence, systemic fragility, and digital opacity—not as mere technocratic problems to solve but as creative and critical challenges that reveal new paths for artistic expression and social reflection.
By pushing the boundaries of curatorship conceptually, geographically, and institutionally, Samman serves as a model for cultural producers navigating digital modernity’s fast-shifting terrain. His approach equips audiences to perceive not just encrypted data streams but the hidden poetics embedded within our shared technological condition. In a world increasingly dominated by algorithmic complexity and systemic risks, engaging with these challenges through art offers one of the most vital ways to understand and shape the futures we inhabit.
发表回复