Dani Ploeger

Dani Ploeger is an artist, cultural critic, and researcher who explores situations of conflict and crisis on the fringes of high-tech consumer culture. He holds a PhD from the University of Sussex and is Professor of Performance and Technology at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (HMTM). He was previously affiliated with the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, where he led the practice-based research project “Disobedient Devices,” investigating the afterlives of consumer technologies in Europe, Asia, and Africa. His artistic practice combines technological objects, video, software, and performance to emphasize the fragility and rawness of materiality in digital culture. He has accompanied frontline troops in the Russo-Ukrainian war to examine the informal use of consumer electronics, travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe, and is currently developing anarchist refrigeration technologies for the Rojava Revolution in North-East Syria. His work A Space War Monument (2020–21), a land art performance and 3D-printed object using a GPS-controlled bulldozer to create an ephemeral monument in the Kuwaiti desert, was commissioned for the Kuwait Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. Other exhibitions include ZKM Karlsruhe, transmediale, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, the London Film Festival, and the Nairobi National Museum. His VR installation The Grass Smells So Sweet (2018) received the jury prize at the VRHAM Festival in Hamburg. He curated Web Residencies for Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM. Homepage: daniploeger.org

Selected Bibliography
Ploeger, Dani. Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences: Everyday Technologies in Extreme Circumstances. Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2022.
Ploeger, Dani. Destructive Circuits: A Machine Archaeology of Improvised Explosive Devices. Rotterdam: V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, 2024.