technarchy
TECHNARCHY and LOVE
TECHNARCHY and LOVE is an ongoing artistic research project that began in September 2025 during the residency Beyond Gravity: Decolonizing the Digital at Theater im Depot, Dortmund (Germany). The project investigates techno not merely as a musical genre, but as a migratory form of resistance, a ritual technology, and a historically situated embodiment of social, political, and affective forces.
Techno as Embodied, Migratory Force
The first instantiation of the project explored techno as a deeply embodied and spatial practice—one that situates bodies fully within time, rhythm, vibration, and collective intensity. Drawing from the early electronic sound cultures emerging in the 1980s, the work foregrounded techno’s capacity to generate energy, solidarity, and altered states of perception through repetition, beats, and electronic sound.
Techno appears here as a form that is never static: it migrates, mutates, and absorbs historical tensions, carrying with it memories of struggle, futurity, and collective invention.
Synthetic Rave as Political Ritual
At Beyond Gravity and during the festival, I created an intermediated synthetic space generated through artificial intelligence. Within this space, AI-generated songs, visuals, and music videos—such as Dark Enlightenment, Techno Republic, and related vectors—were produced and performed.
These works embodied the multiplicity of ideologies currently coalescing under the banner of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”, including the resurgence of white supremacy, techno-eugenics, accelerationism, and authoritarian imaginaries embedded in contemporary technological culture.
Rather than reproducing these ideologies uncritically, the project reversed the gaze. Working from perspectives rooted in the Global South, we created songs in English and German that articulate the paradox of being embedded within a vortex of forces pushing democratic societies toward right-wing authoritarianism and techno-fascism—forces unfolding in real time during the residency, alongside the rise of surveillance capitalism, companies such as Palantir, and new configurations of power within contemporary U.S. and European politics.
Ritual, Catastrophe, and Cognitive Capitalism
The resulting environment took the form of a synthetic rave ritual—simultaneously celebratory and catastrophic. Performers operated within rule-based systems, interacting with AI-driven visuals and sound. A DJ set activated audio-reactive environments composed of projected visuals, dynamic lighting, smoke, and artificial fog, transforming the space into a charged site of sensory immersion.
The work intentionally staged a tension between collective ecstasy and political dread—between ritual gathering and the tragedy of cognitive capitalism, data extraction, and ubiquitous technological surveillance.
Origins, Erasure, and Migration
Following the Dortmund instantiation, I decided to continue and deepen this investigation by returning to the origins of techno, particularly the often-erased history of Detroit techno, while acknowledging its dialogue with European electronic traditions such as Kraftwerk.
The project traces techno’s migratory axis—from Detroit in the 1980s, through post–Berlin Wall Germany, and into Amsterdam and London—mapping how historical moments of rupture, reunification, and youth culture shaped techno as both a utopian force and a political container.
Techno, in this project, is understood as holding a double condition:
- a reservoir of hopeful, collective, and speculative energy
- a witness to its own capture within hyper-surveilled, privatized, and financialized digital systems
Installation Series: Triptych — Detroit · Berlin · Caracas
As part of TECHNARCHY and LOVE, I am developing an installation series conceived as a triptych:
Detroit – Berlin – Caracas
Each node functions as a historical, political, and affective vector, mapping different conditions of techno’s emergence, migration, and transformation across geographies shaped by industrial decline, political rupture, colonial histories, and technological imaginaries.
Detroit (Prototype – Realized)
The Detroit installation has been fully realized and prototyped as a generative, audio-reactive environment. It functions as both an installation and a performative interface—an experimental DJ station where sound, image, and interaction co-evolve in real time.
This installation foregrounds Detroit as a foundational site of techno’s invention, while resisting nostalgic or mythological narratives. Instead, it situates Detroit techno within broader questions of automation, Black futurism, industrial collapse, and speculative survival.
Berlin (In Development)
The Berlin installation will focus on post-Wall techno culture, the reoccupation of abandoned spaces, and the role of techno in shaping new forms of collectivity after geopolitical rupture—while critically addressing its entanglement with surveillance, platform capitalism, and cultural commodification.
Caracas (In Development)
The Caracas installation introduces a counter-geography, foregrounding techno as a diasporic, speculative, and survival-oriented practice emerging under conditions of systemic instability, scarcity, and political crisis. Caracas becomes a site for imagining techno beyond Euro-American narratives.
Adaptive Images and Environments
All installations within TECHNARCHY and LOVE employ adaptive visual systems:
- visuals are audio-reactive, responding to frequency, rhythm, and intensity
- image composition shifts according to algorithmic rule systems
- environments adapt to audience interaction, spatial conditions, and temporal duration
Images are not fixed representations but processes—responsive, generative, and contingent. They behave as living interfaces rather than static screens, reinforcing techno’s nature as an embodied, temporal, and relational form.
Formats and Future Directions
TECHNARCHY and LOVE continues as a modular project unfolding through:
- generative installations
- lecture-performances
- talks and workshops
- synthetic techno events, where all sound and visual material is produced using artificial intelligence
I am developing a growing series of audio-reactive installations and sound-visualization systems that function like experimental DJ stations, allowing audiences to interact directly with AI-generated music and generative imagery.
These environments foreground techno’s current condition: no longer a naïve utopia, but a contested space—where desire, control, embodiment, memory, and computation collide.
Central Question
At its core, TECHNARCHY and LOVE asks:
What does techno become when artificial intelligence, surveillance capitalism, and planetary political crisis are no longer external conditions, but fully embedded within the beat itself?