CODE 2025: Technosferatu

Immortality and Embodiment

Can technology grant eternal life, and if so, what forms of exploitation would it impose on our bodies? The work speculates on how the quest for immortality transforms embodiment into a terrain of discipline, where ageing and vulnerability are reconfigured as problems to be managed. Overall, it asks: in escaping death, do we risk becoming the undead—quantified, surveilled, and stripped of agency?

The installation is staged in a coffin-like vertical seat, where sensors activate the video essay. This setting evokes both a medical and a ritual apparatus, immersing participants in a space where ageing, data labour, and social media collapse into the cloud infrastructure. Does the body in Technosferatum become a by-product, a patient, a worker, or an experiment?

A voice-over accompanies the experience, guiding participants through moments of uncertainty and instruction on how to embody immortality. Shifting between authority and disintegration, it blurs the line between empowerment and submission, between utopian promise and the uncanny loss of agency. In this uneasy passage, Technosferatu offers guidelines on what it means to live—perhaps forever—within the logics of optimisation.

The Protocol

Technosferatu functions as a protocol, exposing the infrastructures that sustain longevity culture. As a protocol that seeks to remain up to date, it is never stable and must be constantly adapted. It examines how technologies of optimisation and data reshape social and political life, and the entanglements between bodies, algorithms, and governance.

Understanding the protocol involves learning the “how-to” of this culture: the millions of videos online, the products to be used, the routines, and the synchronised devices that provide step-by-step guidance to the unknown, to the desired.

Within the protocol, data is understood as a bloodline. Participants are invited to lie down, relax, and follow the steps of Technosferatu.