The psychological alienation induced by emerging technologies has been curator Nadim Samman’s primary research focus for more than a decade. The culmination of his time as curator for the digital sphere at the KW Institute in Berlin (2020–24) was last year’s exhibition ‘Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene’, which shared its name with Samman’s book of 2023. Work by 39 artists, including Rindon Johnson and enorê, comprised a surprisingly earnest plea for keeping sight of the human in a world where, in Samman’s words, ‘digital change is upending our experience of cultural life’. Samman is currently director of the Autotelic Foundation in London – as a charity, it has positioned itself as a bulwark against the commercialism of the tech sphere and a haven for artists exploring ‘the creative potential of technology’. Samman is curating the 2026 Vienna Digital Cultures Festival and serves as curator-at-large at the Langen Foundation near Düsseldorf.