Dani Ploeger appointed Professor of Performance and Technology

Dani Ploeger is an artist, cultural critic and activist who explores situations of conflict and crisis at the margins of high-tech consumer culture. He works across a broad spectrum – from media art, performance and installation to film, anarchist technology and cultural studies – drawing on an anthropological fieldwork practice that explores the interplay between technological systems and performance in everyday life.

His artistic works have been exhibited worldwide, e.g. at the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the London Film Festival, the Nairobi National Museum, the transmediale and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig.

Ploeger grew up in the Dutch province of Zeeland and went on to study trombone at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and at the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic. In the mid-2000s, he worked as a music and performance teacher in Ramallah, Palestine. He then completed a PhD in media art, performance and cultural theory at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. From 2013 to 2015, Ploeger was senior lecturer and course instructor for Performance Arts and The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He is currently a research fellow at the same institute, leading the artistic research project »Disobedient Devices«, which explores the afterlife of consumer technologies in Europe, Asia and Africa. He is a fellow at the »V2_Lab for the unstable media« in Rotterdam, where he initiated the project »Destructive Circuits«, which investigates the appropriation of everyday technologies in the construction of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). He also works with the University of Rojava in Qamishlo, in the autonomous administration of northern and eastern Syria, where he co-organises the Rojava Center for Democratic Technologies, an anarchist innovation collective for post-capitalist technology.

The Hightech Agenda Bavaria (HTA) is an investment programme of the Free State of Bavaria. It strengthens all state universities in Bavaria with additional study places, professorships, scientific and non-scientific staff as well as funds for infrastructure. At our university, the HTA enables an in-depth examination of digitality and artificial intelligence in the context of artistic production.