Gerald Nestler is an artist-researcher based in Vienna. His postdisciplinary practice investigates how technological and financial systems, models, and narratives shape social reality, knowledge, and agency. Working across installation, video, performance, intervention, graphics, sound, speech, and text, he brings artistic practice into dialogue with theoretical inquiry and conversation.
Through formats such as the art series The Future of Demonstration, he brings art, theory, science, and other fields of knowledge and experience into relation, allowing their distinct perspectives to shape shared forms of artistic inquiry and experience.
Collaboration and collective modes of thinking and making are central to his practice. His projects grow out of sustained artistic and intellectual relationships – many extending across projects and over time – including long-term collaborations with artist Sylvia Eckermann and the Technopolitics working group.
Nestler graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was also a researcher with Forensic Architecture.
His work has been shown internationally since the late 1990s, and his practice extends to writing. He also writes, edits, and lectures at the intersections of art, technology, finance, and media.
Three interdependent concepts provide the framework for his artistic research, connecting the analysis of contemporary power with practices of perception, contestation, and collective agency:
the derivative condition describes how technocapitalism’s power to claim the future depends on replacing established forms of representation with performative operations. These turn promises into contingent claims, potentials into fungible options, and values into prices. Data-driven models, technologies, operations, and narratives seek to generate leverage from the volatilities colliding across vast fields of social and ecological contingency.
The resulting global hypercompetition produces a social asset-class system in which a narrow leverage class exercises exploitative control over differentiated tiers of debt classes. Below and beyond these tiers are those denied even the capacity to enter into debt as recognized economic subjects. This hierarchy is sustained by the extraction of environments and nonhuman life – worlds that cannot be subsumed under the category of class, yet are rendered available as resources, assets, and sites of risk displacement.
aesthetics of resolution is a concept and toolbox for resisting the asymmetries of the derivative condition. Drawing on the full semiotic range of “resolution,” it examines the claims that become operative through promises – not only what a promise declares, but what it enables, authorizes, or comes to demand as conditions change.
Aesthetics of resolution seeks to transform transparency from a promise that leaves its addressees without agency into an open, contested ecology of more-than-human communication and democratic participation. By making operative claims perceptible and contestable, aesthetics of resolution creates conditions for renegade agency.
renegade agency investigates how this capacity to contest and intervene can be exercised collectively through practices of sharing risk. It begins from the premise that, amid the growing convergence of authoritarian rule, oligarchic wealth, corporate AI, and concentrated control over digital, financial, media, and material infrastructures, resistance must move beyond critique and dissent toward practices capable of disrupting, betraying, and transforming the systems through which power is exercised.
Renegade activism names the situated practices that follow from this shift. Here, solidarity means collectively assuming risk in confronting social, political, and ecological injustice – whether by resisting from within systems, organizing against them, or supporting those who do.