PSA hosts the Shanghai stop for this traveling exhibition about techno music and culture, technology, and futurism. “TECHNO WORLDS” is a five-year international touring project initiated in 2021 by the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany that engages and examines a wide spectrum of issues, including art, media, technology, identity, and space, and unfolds through diverse narratives and practices across different temporal and spatial contexts. Here in Shanghai, “TECHNO WORLDS” will enter into dialogue with Chinese artists, further extending and rearticulating the interpretive dimensions and significance of Techno. The exhibition brings together 23 groups of works from diverse temporal and spatial contexts, illuminating links between humanity and culture, history, and technology, weaving a multi-layered landscape: the post-industrial withdrawal of Detroit, the cross-cultural connections shaped by Berlin’s urban transformation, the historical fabric of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Afrofuturism. This is PSA’s first project dedicated entirely to music and its associated cultures. Following exhibitions in Budapest, Montreal, New York, Portland, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Montevideo, Zurich, Dresden, Columbus, Kolkata, and Beijing, the project now arrives at its final stop in Shanghai.

Participating Artists

Aleksandra Domanović, ayrtbh, Benjamin Bacon & Vivian Xu, Carsten Nicolai, Chicks on Speed, Daniel Pflumm, DeForrest Brown, Jr. & AbuQadim Haqq, Henrike Naumann & Bastian Hagedorn, Jeremy Shaw, Kerstin Greiner, Mamba Negra, Maryam Jafri, Rangoato Hlasane, Robert Lippok, Ryōji Ikeda, Sarah Schönfeld, The Otolith Group, Tobias Zielony, Tony Cokes, UFO Media Lab, Adel-Jing Wang, Zhang Ding, Zuzanna Czebatul

About Techno and TECHNO WORLDS

As a global phenomenon, Techno has not only shaped the history of music but has also exerted a profound influence on contemporary culture, art, popular culture, media consumption, and technologies. It is, of course, music—but also far more than music. Its resonance extends into design, fashion, philosophy, subcultures, and the relationships between humans, machines, and virtual worlds. As both a way of life and a mode of temporal perception that transcends national boundaries, Techno reflects the social structures, spatial conditions, and economic environments in which it emerges, while also serving as a means of engaging with reality itself.

Originating in Detroit, Techno has developed rapidly and spread globally since the 1980s. With the advance of digital technologies and shifting historical conditions, a world once imagined as relatively controllable has undergone profound transformation. In Germany, Techno has often been understood as a cultural bridge between East and West; Berlin, in particular, rose to prominence through the 1990s Love Parade and Techno clubs that became legendary, gradually establishing itself as one of the most important Techno metropolises.

Techno and club culture have engendered different eras, styles, and variants and are constantly reinventing themselves. TECHNO WORLDS focuses on the multiplicity of electronic music scenes, genres, and subcultural-political practices that have emerged across different regions and historical moments. Drawing on the works of visual artists and musicians, the project manifests these phenomena and case studies through narrative and visual modes of presentation. Their works explore the complexities of electronic music: its entanglements with technology and philosophy, the tension between its critique of consumerism and its own commodification, the political dimensions of urban and club spaces, and its diverse histories and narratives.

The Shanghai edition features ayrtbh, Benjamin Bacon & Vivian Xu, UFO Media Lab, Adel-Jing Wang, and Zhang Ding, presenting five local artistic perspectives that respond to time, medium, and perception within a contemporary technological context. Their practices unfold across multiple dimensions: an inquiry into the relationship between time and media through the lens of “machine historicity;” a challenge to linear narrative that instead turns to “micro-time” beneath the threshold of human perception; the transformation of “naming” into a computable temporal structure pointing towards an “automated ritual” within systemic operation; an investigation of potential “aural ethics” in the raw condition of sound, before its commodification as a cultural sign; and a “reactive sound apparatus” controlled by muted systems that offers a critique of the pathological landscape of contemporary culture. Certain works further translate digital content into a structural presence in physical space that forcibly opens a continuously generative liminal field between “physical reality” and “the cyber realm.”