In response to transmediale's 2025 theme, this year’s research workshop, organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale, reflects on how current networked, technological environments are designing, capturing, and capitalising on ways of being social. The workshop’s title references a quote from Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi stating painfully that, “in love as in boxing, everything is a matter of distance”. Throughout two days, the workshop led by part of the DARC team Pablo Velasco, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, Søren Pold, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Nicolas Maleve, and Jussi Parikka – will relate to the temporalities of always-on and FOMO, to the aesthetics as ways of sensing distance and proximity and to the possibilities for resistance and critique. During the festival, participants will share their work in progress in a collective presentation.

Featuring work by Minke Nouwens, Ruben van de Ven, Megan Phipps Christoffer, Koch Andersen, Tommy Shaffer Shane, Sami Itavuori, Matīss Groskaufmanis, Maja Funke, Katya Sivers, Daria Iuriichuk, Kola Heyward-Rotimi, Nico Daleman, Paul V. Schmidt, Maya Erin Masuda.

The workshop is organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University) in collaboration with transmediale. The workshop is also supported by SHAPE Digital Citizenship project at Aarhus University and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University).