Currents.Systems: Data as Performance

SYMPOSIUM DAY ONE – GUEST SESSION SIX
Workshop with Géraldine Honauer

A system is never just code. It is intention, relation, and a quiet form of movement. When data begins to shift, a small world appears. Patterns fold, break, rebuild. We follow these movements and learn to sense how structures shape experience long before we notice them. In Currents.systems, data behaves like living material, forming patterns and relational ecologies that reveal how worlds are built.
We work in short, focused steps. Light ideas. Quick sketches. Enough to see how a rule becomes behaviour, and how behaviour becomes worldmaking. Invisible materials such as air quality become thinkable once they gain form. Sensor communities and citizen science show how the unseen can turn into shared responsibility, and how ecological processes echo within digital flows.
Together, we examine how system architecture influences perception and how the architecture of technology mirrors environmental dynamics. Participants create small system sketches to model interactions, narratives, and flows. These are not final designs, but tools for sensing how structures support or disturb shared environments. Currents.systems invites a way of building that begins with attention to the unseen, and a way of imagining that grows from the smallest signal.

Participant Information: No preparation is needed, and no materials are required.

Additional Information: During the WORLDMAKING MATTERS 2026 symposium, Metaquest headsets will be available for exploring the SHIFT metaverse world and the XR environment of Currents.

Further Information on the Workshops with Géraldine Honauer:
The contribution of Currents.systems and SHIFT to WORLDMAKING MATTERS. extends the symposium’s questions into the digital field, where worlds are built through attention, movement and relation as much as through material practices. Both workshops look at sustainability not as a static principle but as a structural process – something that unfolds in the way systems behave, how value is shaped, and how communities organise themselves across physical, virtual, and onchain environments.
Currents.systems explores how invisible flows and signals create ecological architectures, and how responsibility begins with noticing what moves beneath the surface. SHIFT continues this line of inquiry by entering digital fashion and digital work as spaces where new economic textures emerge. Here, labour becomes gesture, value becomes relational, and technology becomes a medium for collective imagination.
Together, the workshops propose a simple but expansive idea: worlds are made not only through what we produce, but through how we maintain, observe and participate in the systems around us. This approach aligns with the symposium’s interest in worldmaking as a shared and evolving practice, inviting participants to sense how digital ecologies shape the futures we choose to build.

Géraldine Honauer is an artist and system architect working across digital infrastructures, collective practices, and experimental publishing. Her projects explore how systems shape social and environmental relations, moving between online platforms, performative technologies, and spatial communication.
Her work has been presented at Ars Electronica and recognised by the Swiss Art Awards. She has participated in several international residencies, developing research on digital ecologies and collaborative frameworks. With SHIFT, she investigates value and labor in virtual and onchain environments. With Currents.systems, she treats data as material and data performance as a form of collective world-making.
www.geraldinehonauer.com
www.currents.system
www.shiftwork.cc
https://www.instagram.com/geraldinehonauer

Registration: roswitha.gabriel@plus.ac.at

Concept, Organization and Host: Doris Posch

This Guest Session is taking place in the context of WORLDMAKING MATTERS. International Multi-Day Symposium on Sustainable Fashion, Design and Arts, 15 Dec 2025 and 17 – 19 Jan 2026