DRESDEN.- The internationally active artist duo Quadrature - Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch – has been nominated for the Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden 2026. As part of their six-month residency at the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden from February to July 2026, the artists will develop the project “The Mass of Money” at TUD Dresden University of Technology. The project is conceived as a large-scale, immersive audiovisual installation that aims to interweave economic data with cosmological models.

Gerfried Stocker, Artistic Director and CEO of Ars Electronica in Linz, commented on the nomination of the duo: “As a member of the selection committee for the Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden, I have followed the remarkable and continuous development of this ambitious programme with great interest since 2020. The nomination of Quadrature strikes me as both fitting and compelling: Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch combine a high level of conceptual and aesthetic aspiration with an artistic practice that engages with fundamental questions surrounding the use of data, while also shining a light on themes that resonate strongly and carry considerable relevance in science and research.”

Since 2015, Quadrature has been working on a transdisciplinary practice in which technology is purposefully used to investigate and shape social realities. Data functions not merely as abstract information but as an artistic material that reveals social power structures, infrastructures, and worldviews. Their works operate at the intersection of media art, critical data research, and collaborative artistic inquiry. The starting point of the new project is a simple yet far-reaching premise: the accumulation of capital is understood as a gravitational force. Analogous to astrophysics, where mass amplifies its own attraction, wealth also follows exponential laws.

Historical and contemporary data on wealth and income distribution is translated into a dynamic simulation in which economic inequality becomes tangible as a distorted space-time field. The human being disappears as a benchmark; what remains visible is the physics of power.

The central data source is the World Inequality Database (WID.world), supplemented by additional economic datasets – for example, on the development of global wealth, stock market movements, corporate concentration, or cryptocurrencies.

“The Mass of Money” is conceived as the starting point of a new series of works by Quadrature, which explores how economic systems shape our perceptions of the world, of order, and of scale. Drawing on economic data regarding inequality and wealth distribution, the artists translate abstract processes into visual and acoustic spaces. In collaboration with scientists and researchers at TUD, this data is not only analysed but also artistically transformed into new, tangible forms.

Reflecting on their nomination, Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch emphasise: “The programme offers the ideal environment for the evolution of our project. The Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden provides perfect conditions for interdisciplinary exchange and expertise, intensive research, and focused artistic development. Data is our primary artistic material: we see it as a form of technology for reading and (re)writing our realities. The Lab’s guiding theme, ‘Data↔Worlds. Sociotechnical and Cultural Syntheses of New Realities’, is therefore taken quite literally: data as the material through which worlds are created and reshaped.”

Quadrature is the artistic duo of Juliane Götz (born in 1984 in Erding, lives in Heidesee) and Sebastian Neitsch (born in 1982 in Hamburg, lives in Heidesee). They got to know each other while studying at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle and have been working together since 2015. They have received multiple international awards, including the Prix Ars Electronica (2015, 2018), as well as grants from Stiftung Kunstfonds, Akademie Schloss Solitude, La Becque, and a fellowship from Podium Esslingen and Hertz-Lab at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Their works often emerge from close collaboration with scientific institutions and are exhibited worldwide in museums, art halls, and transdisciplinary contexts.