How can we get more out of the digital than we put in? What do we do to stay physically and mentally #healthy while spending time online? And can our digital time be more #playful and #fun? Artist Gabriel Hensche asked these questions to artists from around the internet and collaboratively developed an exercise with each of them for digital #survival and #thrival. Gabriel and curator Ashlee Conery then produced exercise videos to share these artists’ practices for physical, mental and virtual ‘fitness’ to hopefully help you actively and joyfully move through online and offline spaces.
👉🏽/@exercisesforthedigitalage
Credits
concept & instigator – Gabriel Hensche
curator & collaborator – Ashlee Conery
postproduction – Dernis Golenja
sound design – Becky Brown
camera – Petra Mrša
Advisor – Tomke Brown
Contributing artists:
OMSK Social Club, Rory Pilgrim, Mattin, Jin-me Yoon, Ayumi Goto, Peter Morin, Roberto Fassone, Jan Hofer, Niccolò Moronato, Raùl Hott, Dorothea Rust, Thanh Nguyen, Phung Nam, Kim Trang, Giang Nguyen Hoang, Claire Nichols, Stéphanie Cadoret, Jol Thoms, Delphine Pouillé, Sarah Friend, Mohsen Hazrati, Sophie Kahn, Gabriella Torres-Ferrer, Sonja Pregrad
Across Europe, cultural and educational spaces are feeling real pressure right now — especially the conditions that let us learn, create, and think together across disciplines, borders, and institutions.
School of Commons is our global hybrid learning ecosystem for transdisciplinary peer learning and commons-based knowledge production. We’ve supported 157 collaborative projects since 2017, with a growing network of participants + alumn*.
Learning together creates space against disappearance — world-making, again and again.
Huge thanks to everyone who’s already co-signed the letter and reached out — looking forward to connecting more in the coming days.
You can support this work:
Co-sign the open letter.
Share widely.
Connect with us.
🔗 Link in bio
#SchoolOfCommons #CollectiveLearning #KnowledgeCommons #PeerLearning #AlternativeEducation
What is School of Commons?
School of Commons is a global, commons-based, peer-driven learning community working across disciplines and geographies.
Learning unfolds through peer facilitation, self-organisation, shared responsibility, and collective study — grounded in process, experimentation, and transdisciplinary exchange.
Open to individuals and groups, regardless of professional background, it brings people together to learn from one another across contexts.
Since 2017, this has grown into 150+ collaborative projects and a distributed community spanning six continents.
At its core, the work challenges traditional models of education — shifting away from hierarchy, closed knowledge, and competition, towards shared practice, commoning, and collective, self-organised knowledge production.
It moves within, alongside, and beyond institutional education — at a time when spaces for collective learning are increasingly fragile.
This work continues.
You can support this work:
• Read and co-sign the open letter • Share this campaign • Connect with us about partnership or funding
🔗 Link in bio
“When spaces for collective learning disappear, what is lost is not only a programme, but a shared infrastructure for thinking, organising, and imagining together.”
#SchoolOfCommons #CollectiveLearning #KnowledgeCommons #PeerLearning #AlternativeEducation
“When spaces for collective learning disappear, what is lost is not only a programme, but a shared infrastructure for thinking, organising, and imagining together.”
School of Commons has been hosted by Zürich University of the Arts since 2017.
Over nine years it has grown into a global peer-learning community connecting practitioners, artists, activists, archivists, organisers, writers, architects, scientists, researchers, students, and educators across six continents.
ZHdK has now decided to discontinue School of Commons in its current form.
The work of School of Commons does not end here.
Today we are publishing an open letter reflecting on what has been built and inviting institutions, collaborators, and supporters to help ensure this collective learning space can continue to grow.
You can support this work by:
• Read and co-sign the open letter
• Share this campaign
• Connect with us about partnership or funding
🔗 Link in bio
#SchoolOfCommons #CollectiveLearning #KnowledgeCommons #PeerLearning #AlternativeEducation
SoC Assembly 2026: Making a Vessel in the Sky
🗓 Thursday 5 – Sunday 8 February 2026 🌐 Public / Online / CET
🔗 Zoom link in bio
The SoC Assembly 2026 is taking shape — not as a fixed structure, but as a living ecology of encounters, practices, and shared work.
If ‘Tensile Structures’ names the condition, ‘Making a Vessel in the Sky’ names the response: collectivity brought into being through shared belief, care, and coordination. Not as something fixed or inherited, but as something we actively make — through relation rather than certainty, through practice rather than monument.
Across the Assembly, learning unfolds as a living commons — through projects, publications, gatherings, rituals, infrastructures, and shared spaces. Knowledge moves as something held in common, shaped by care, proximity, translation, memory, and more-than-human relations.
This is not a structure you enter. It is a structure you help form.
Not a framework to stand on — but a vessel we keep building, together.
You don’t arrive at it. You step into it. And in doing so, you become part of its making.
👉 Programme overview in slides 🔗 Visit our website for the full programme
#SchoolOfCommons #SoCAssembly2026 #MakingAVesselInTheSky #TensileStructures
Mentally I am here – virtual show on Voxels
Join the virtual event “Mentally I’m Here and There” on December 7 at 11 am:
Alongside the exhibition at MMSU Rijeka, a virtual exhibition opens on Voxels on December 5 at 8 pm. Curated by Ashlee Conery (CubeCommons), it features works by Total Refusal, Gabriel Hensche, Petra Mrša and Susanna Flock.
The online event offers a playful, interactive tour through the virtual show.
Join us here: /play?coords=N@572E ,420N
Mentally I’m There @mmsurijeka has partnered with with @cubecommons to host a Virtual iteration of their exhibition on new media art in our Voxels gallery! The exhibition opens Today! Annnnd will host a public program Sunday December 6/7 depending on your #timezone 10pm-11pm PST. See bio for link 🔗. Content will also be featured on CubeCommons.ca Thank you to artists @petramrsa@gabrielhensche@susanna_flo@totalrefusal And Board member @mikestjean for generously supporting CubeCommons gallery on Voxels
@gabrielhensche Gabriel Hensche in unserer Ausstellung. Die Videoarbeit „I´m not sure“ von 2017 nimmt eine KI-Entwicklung der heutigen Tage vorweg. Im Video arbeitet Hensche mit einer App, in der das Programm durch die Handykamera gesichtete Objekte benennt. Der Künstler konfrontiert die Programmierung mit den poetischen Malereien von Rene Magritte, einem belgischen Surrealisten. Die dabei ausgesprochenen Benennungen sind falsch, werden jedoch durch das Nichterkennen auf einer anderen Ebene ebenfalls poetisch.
Gabriel Hensche, „I´m not sure“, Videoarbeit, 2017
„Der Ausgangspunkt meiner Arbeiten ist die jeweilige Situation. Sie verändern ihre Form und entwickeln sich im Dialog mit den Menschen, treten in einen Austausch mit ihrer Umgebung. Kooperation und Dialog waren in den letzten Jahren treibende Kräfte meiner Arbeit. In meinen aktuellen Projekten arbeite ich nun nicht nur mit Menschen, sondern auch mit verschiedenen intelligenten Systemen zusammen. Was können wir über unsere Wahrnehmung lernen, wenn wir beobachten, wie Maschinen die Welt interpretieren? Der Film „I‘m not sure“ (2017) zeigt, wie eine App, die als Sehhilfe für Blinde entwickelt wurde, Kunstwerke interpretiert.“
„Gabriel Hensche (...) arbeitet mit bewegten Bildern, Performances und inszenierten Situationen, die Möglichkeiten für Gemeinschaft und Koexistenz angesichts aktueller technologischer Entwicklungen ausloten. Gemeinsam mit anderen Künstlern entwickelt er Übungen, Rituale und Spiele, die die Überzeugung teilen, dass „Spiel“ eine destabilisierende Wirkung haben kann, die soziale Normen aufbricht und möglicherweise eingefahrene, reflexartige Lebensweisen wiederbelebt. (Zhdk)“
“ECHOPRAXIA“ Museum Schloss Untergröningen
23. August – 22. November 2025
KISS e.V., Museum Schloss Untergröningen, 73453 Abtsgmünd-Untergröningen.
🍓
VJEŽBA No.13
Intimacy in the Algorithmic Are
GABRIEL HENSCHE
Tue 18/11 19h
🍓 RSVP ~~ [email protected] 🍓
Berlin-based artist Gabriel Hensche will present and discuss a selection of his works that explore what it means to be a social being in the face of current technological developments —when chatbots become our daily companions and tech companies reach beyond our attention to seek our intimacy. The event will focus on a selection of Hensche’s moving image works that investigate themes of (digital) intimacy, the psychology of AI, and the relationship between algorithms and affect.
The following workshop shares a co-creation method from his project Exercises for the Digital Age. It invites participants to experiment with a drawing-based practice that opens space for exchange — about your relationship with your digital self, peer learning among artists, tech fascism, and possibilities for playful intimacy in digital spaces.
Gabriel Hensche is a German artist working with moving image, performance, and constructed situations. His practice explores forms of playfulness, togetherness, and possibilities of intimacy in the face of current technological developments. He contributed to the founding of Campus Gegenwart at HMDK Stuttgart, and since 2023 has been part of the leadership team at the School of Commons (ZHdK), where he oversees the peer learning program. In 2024, he co-founded the University of Tiny Moments at the Casino for Social Medicine in Berlin.
