­Schaufler Lab Concludes Second Funding Phase with an International Conference

Data↔Worlds: Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden Concludes Its Second Funding Phase with International Conference

From 28 to 30 September 2026, the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden hosted the international and interdisciplinary conference Data Worlds in the Görges-Bau at TUD Dresden University of Technology. Marking the conclusion of the Lab’s second funding phase, the three-day event brought together researchers, artists, and practitioners across a wide range of fields to examine the mutual shaping of data-driven technologies and contemporary worlds.

Across six thematic panels and three keynote lectures, perspectives from media studies, art and design, geography, law, philosophy, theology, environmental research, political theory, and critical data studies were brought into dialogue. Discussions ranged from data politics, decision-making, and hermeneutics to questions of belief, ecology, aesthetics, and epistemology. The keynote contributions by Joanna Zylinska, Louise Amoore, and Manuela Naveau examined model collapse as a cultural condition, the probabilistic logics of generative AI, and the role of artistic practice in making otherwise imperceptible structures and relations tangible and opening possibilities for imagining them otherwise.

One of the highlights of the conference was the opening of The Mass of Money, which was developed during Quadrature’s six-month Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden. The exhibition explores wealth concentration and global inequality by translating economic data and abstract market processes into planetary and cosmological analogies. Drawing on models from physics, Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch use celestial bodies, galaxies, and black holes to make processes of accumulation, attraction, and self-reinforcing wealth concentration perceptible. Developed through exchanges with researchers across TUD and the Schaufler Kolleg, the exhibition brought artistic and scholarly approaches to capital, data, and inequality into dialogue.

The conference was also a moment of reflection on what has taken shape over the course of the second funding phase: an interdisciplinary research community at the Schaufler Lab committed to thinking across fields, methods, and forms of practice. We are grateful to all speakers, participants, collaborators, and colleagues who contributed not only to these three days of exchange, but also to the conversations, collaborations, and shared work that have shaped the Lab over the past years.