WORLD WIDE WIKI

Nevertheless, with around 65 million articles and hundreds of thousands of active, anonymous, and volunteer authors, Wikipedia is today an indispensable archive of free knowledge on the World Wide Web. But this free knowledge is under acute threat. AI companies are training their Large Language Models with Wikipedia's open-source texts, thereby extracting knowledge for their proprietary products. At the same time, the culture war from the right is gaining momentum: Wikipedia's non-profit status is being questioned, funding is being withdrawn, and the identities of its authors are being exposed.

Wikipedia is just one prominent example of the current state of free knowledge online. Whether it's digital archives, social media, or government websites: information disappears and is censored—often disguised as criticism of supposed “wokeness” and under the guise of free speech. Whether the internet truly never forgets has ultimately become a question of power, the interests of capital, and political influence.

How can digital art address this situation and raise awareness of it? How can it even find ways to preserve endangered knowledge and keep it accessible?

Together with the DIGITAL SPRING Festival at ARGEkultur Salzburg and the DIGITHALIA Festival at Schauspielhaus Graz, HAU Hebbel am Ufer launched an open call in autumn 2025, inviting the development of digital art projects on this topic.

As a result, the following six artists and collectives were selected: the artist duo eeefff and the artist Chinedum Muotto from Berlin; the artist Nina Vasilchenko and a collaborative project by the collectives gold extra and Kronberger & Kronberger from Salzburg; From Graz: Works by the artist collectives SOAP and Planetenpartyprinzip.

eeefff

Tactical Forgetting

“Tactical Forgetting” is a web-based, participatory game and a computer-assisted mental exercise that explores digital memory, shared knowledge, and strikes. Drawing on the artist's own experience as an activist during the 2020 revolution in Belarus, the project examines how infrastructural systems of care can support cyber-partisan practices and resistance. Users navigate along various narrative paths, choosing their own direction.

The resulting path offers insights into vanishing archives and obscured protocols, as well as internet blockades and digital battlefields. The work rethinks affective computer technology and algorithmic power structures, asking how oppressed communities can act amidst digital fascism and build new infrastructures of imagination.

The duo eeefff (Minsk/Berlin) is an artistic collaboration, an invented institution, a cybernetic political brigade, a poetic calculation, a hacking unit, or queer time. Active since 2013, eeefff works with emotions and affects shaped by technology, creating software-based projects, publications, networks, and platforms that critically engage with digital labor, value creation, and community building.

Their methods include public actions, online interventions, performative seminars, software and hardware hacking, and the choreography of everyday life. Since 2022, the duo has organized the “School of Algorithmic Solidarity,” which they founded to explore the relationships between infrastructural time, algorithmic abstractions, and bodies. eeefff are co-organizers of “Work Hard! Play Hard!” (2016–2020), “Decentric Circles Assembly” (2024), and “Forest Assembly of Educational Fictions” (2025).

Chinedum Muotto

The Sankofa Protocol

What if the internet hadn't forgotten its manners? What if it asked you to listen before giving you an answer? “The Sankofa Protocol” is a speculative fork in the road of digital knowledge. We see how the “free knowledge” of Wikipedia is absorbed by AI, erasing context and authorship. This future, however, is rejected here. The work is a different kind of tool. A digital offering. To a self-posed question from the present day, the protocol answers not with data, but with ancient wisdom. It recounts orally transmitted stories, complete with their history, their essence, and the conditions of their transmission. The project is not a database. It is a relationship. It opens a world where technology is no longer needed.