CODE 2025: Technosferatu

On Longevity Culture and Algorithmic Infrastructures

Technosferatu is a protocol exploring how algorithmic systems turn the body into a site of labour, optimisation, and exploitation in pursuit of longevity. Reimagining the immortal vampire through techno-optimism and eternal youth, it unfolds as a video essay installation with audience engagement.
West
Digital Future
Independent & Critical Design
Digital
C1
Next Nature Museum
Noord Brabantlaan 1A
5652LA

Entrance fee

Free access

Hosted by

IMPAKT
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Opening hours

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Free Wifi Free wifi available
Toilets Toilets available
Wheelchair Friendly Fully wheelchair accessible
Wheelchair Friendly Toilet Wheelchair friendly toilet available

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Immortality and Embodiment

Can technology grant eternal life, and if so, what forms of exploitation would it impose on our bodies? The work speculates on how the quest for immortality transforms embodiment into a terrain of discipline, where ageing and vulnerability are reconfigured as problems to be managed. Overall, it asks: in escaping death, do we risk becoming the undead—quantified, surveilled, and stripped of agency?

The installation is staged in a coffin-like vertical seat, where sensors activate the video essay. This setting evokes both a medical and a ritual apparatus, immersing participants in a space where ageing, data labour, and social media collapse into the cloud infrastructure. Does the body in Technosferatum become a by-product, a patient, a worker, or an experiment?

A voice-over accompanies the experience, guiding participants through moments of uncertainty and instruction on how to embody immortality. Shifting between authority and disintegration, it blurs the line between empowerment and submission, between utopian promise and the uncanny loss of agency. In this uneasy passage, Technosferatu offers guidelines on what it means to live—perhaps forever—within the logics of optimisation.

The Protocol

Technosferatu functions as a protocol, exposing the infrastructures that sustain longevity culture. As a protocol that seeks to remain up to date, it is never stable and must be constantly adapted. It examines how technologies of optimisation and data reshape social and political life, and the entanglements between bodies, algorithms, and governance.

Understanding the protocol involves learning the “how-to” of this culture: the millions of videos online, the products to be used, the routines, and the synchronised devices that provide step-by-step guidance to the unknown, to the desired.

Within the protocol, data is understood as a bloodline. Participants are invited to lie down, relax, and follow the steps of Technosferatu.

Installation view
Installation view
Petr Kroschinsky

Hosted by IMPAKT

Every year CODE brings together artists and non-artists in a 5-month process of inspiration, discussion and co-creation to produce artistic interventions. All the works produced address the key questions of the CODE project: How can we improve the agency we have over our digital lives? How can we become less dependent on Big Tech? How can governments better protect our digital rights? CODE 2025 is organized by IMPAKT (NL) in collaboration with Werktank (BE), PrivacySalon (BE) and NØ SCHOOL (FR)

Colofon

Sophia Bulgakova (UA/NL), Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Sophia Bulgakova is an interdisciplinary artist, scientist and activist, working with art, technology, and contemporary social structures, with a focus on the relationship between cultural identity, perception, and imagination.
⁠Rising Lai (TW/BE), Hasselt, Belgium
Rising Lai is an artistic researcher, critical designer and current PhD candidate in the research unit of Contextualised Creation at KU Leuven in Belgium, focusing on uncovering the stories behind objects, to explore the complexity of human creations.
Benze De Ream (FR), Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Benze De Ream is een multidisciplinaire ontwerper en onderzoeker die werkt met moving image, nieuwe media, ruimtelijke installatie, tekst, en geluid.
Marianna Stefanitsi (GR), Utrecht, The Netherlands
Marianna Stefanitsi is an interdisciplinary practitioner working across art, research, and communication and a core member of the Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices, contributing to research initiatives.

Partners

Sponsored by CODE 2025: Technosferatu
Sponsored by CODE 2025: Technosferatu
Sponsored by CODE 2025: Technosferatu
Sponsored by CODE 2025: Technosferatu