Touch)(ME

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Digital Arts Department students

In touch lies the human desire to understand and experience the world. It is that moment in which the distance between skin and world collapses, leaving no space between them. Yet touch is not only tactile information, but also an emotional encounter. An impression that arises when something from the outside reaches our inner self.
There is no object we touch more often today than the one that separates us from the world, while at the same time connecting us to it. We swipe across screens, and on the other side meet images, voices, and ideas. Things that move us, that make us feel close, or terribly alone. This thin surface of glass has become the place where we negotiate who we are and where we belong. Resonance emerges, and yet the skin remains untouched.

The question of what touches us today and how our notions of closeness, intimacy, and community are shaped, lies at the center of TOUCH)(ME, a video program by students in the Digital Arts department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Digital Arts Department · student work · mentor: Tina Kult

Video Descriptions

In on the lookout, the body’s surface comes so close that it becomes an eerie, abstract landscape. Cyborgs are jealous of me poetically recounts a chronic skin condition, rejection, inner dialogue, and the slow reclamation of one’s own body. like, subscribe, share condenses into a darkly charged manifesto on contemporary platform logics. You could have done better shows with dry humor how digital optimization technologies penetrate into the most intimate areas of life. Bosnian Pyramid Routine by Daki Rolex stages a grotesque form of digital self-representation, in which self-optimization, ideology, and conspiracy narratives overlap. Tofuism follows a member of a speculative faith community, weaving together everyday life, devotion, and the desire for belonging. becoming digitális szabadságharcos unfolds as a narrative about post-national identity, digital subculture, and political imagination. Fatigue Archive captures the emotional exhaustion of human-AI-interaction, becoming a poetic document of a present in transition. Poems from a Sushi Shop and Xu’s Unofficial Report to Lenin, Winter Twenty Twenty-Five turns its gaze toward the lived realities of migration and labor. Through obsessive found footage editing, Instruments exposes social patterns of sexualized violence, normalized within the uploaded documentation of a wedding. Once-was-rain//Smiling in slowmotion conceives of the body as a fluid, post-anthropocentric, and continuously transforming form, not as a boundary between inside and outside, but as a site of constant becoming.
(Tina Kult, Digital Arts department, University of Applied Arts Vienna)

SYNOPSIS
I’m on the lookout, actively searching and not finding anything. Too close to comfort in a comforting way. on the lookout uses an endoscopic camera to explore different parts of the body in an uncomfortable and disorienting manner. Flashes of familiarity which pretend to orientate the viewer pop up sparingly.

SHORT BIO
Andreas Rippl is a multimedia artist, computer scientist and designer from Vienna.

https://rippl.at

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Rage
Cyborgs are jealous of me
2025 | 6’21

SYNOPSIS
Cyborgs are jealous of me reflects on the lifelong journey with neurodermatitis. It tells stories from the past and inner dialogue of recurring thoughts within a body that is suffering from the chronic skin condition. From loathing and constant devaluation, to acceptance and the ability to see the condition as a skill. One that is worth cherishing, rather than just seeing it as a limitation to the enjoyment of life and a constant burden.

SHORT BIO
Rage is a multidisciplinary artist. Using a variety of media in the physical as well as the digital space. Her works aspire to allow a look into the depths of the psyche. She combines the uncanny with the melancholic, the deep calm with the steady unrest.

https://www.rage.exposed

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Anton Paievski
like share subscribe
2026 | 3’01

SYNOPSIS
like share subscribe is an experimental film built from a single recurring image: the silhouette of a person standing against a field of constantly shifting white noise. There is no face, no clear identity, no discernible action, but only a human figure absorbed by an unstable visual static. Throughout the film, subtitles repeat familiar phrases from online culture – “welcome to my channel”, “like, share and subscribe” and other fragments of digital self-presentation.
The short film reflects on the loneliness embedded in digital culture, where the desire to be seen becomes indistinguishable from disappearing into the signal. What remains is a body without a voice, a channel without content, and a presence slowly dissolving into noise. like share subscribe condenses this condition into a darkly charged manifesto on contemporary platform logics.

SHORT BIO
Born in Russia to a Ukrainian/Tatar family. Lives in Vienna since 2021. Currently studying at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and working as a film editor on various Viennese productions.

https://www.instagram.com/_paievski

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Zita Kayser
You could have done better
2025 | 4’33

SYNOPSIS
Optimize your Linked-in profile. Optimize your morning routine. Optimize your gaming setup. Optimize your work-life-balance. Optimize your sleep. Optimize your learning & creativity. Optimize your social skills. Optimize your nutritional intake.

SHORT BIO
Zita Kayser is a carpenter, graphic designer and media artist living in Vienna. She is very much not into self optimization.

https://zitakayser.com

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David Daki Obradović
Bosnian Pyramid Routine by Daki
2024 | 1’56

SYNOPSIS
In Bosnian Pyramid Routine by Daki, Obradović utilizes an Al Influencer persona to stage a critical intervention into the post-digital psyche. Set against the techno-shamanic mysticism of the Bosnian Pyramids, the work synthesizes the toxic internet underground, lookmaxxxing, gooner loops, and incel tropes, into a radical regime of isolation and optimization. Crucially, the work’s reliance on Al hallucination exposes the volatile risks of the future of hyper-personalised content for obsessed maxxers.

SHORT BIO
David Daki Obradović (b. 1999) lives and works in Vienna. He is among the contemporary artists who engage deeply with the digital age and the transformation of our daily reality. Combining a strong background in graphic design with an intensive engagement with Al tools, he explores the tension between human intention and technological autonomy to capture the ambivalent reality of our post-digital age.

https://daki.now

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Sei Jeung
Tofuism
2026 | 15’52

SYNOPSIS
Tofuism is a video work that explores the relationship between belief and existence through the digital traces of a follower of a fictional religion centered on tofu. The work follows a user’s navigation of YouTube videos and other online material associated with the believer. As this digital archive is gradually explored, everyday rituals, reflections, and acts of devotion emerge, revealing how belief is continuously performed and maintained online.
Rather than asking what is real, Tofuism focuses on how certain forms of existence are constituted through belief. In this context, belief is not merely something that supports existence, but a condition of existence itself. Through the believer’s sincere commitment to an improbable faith, the work invites viewers to consider how belief shapes what is able to exist in the first place.

SHORT BIO
Sei Jeung is a Korean artist currently studying in Vienna. Her work explores belief systems, speculative narratives, and unseen worlds through videos. She examines how ideas that cannot be verified continue to shape human behavior, perception, and reality.

https://www.instagram.com/seisays.sei

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Franci Kas
becoming digitális szabadságharcos – gameplay (becoming a digital freedom fighter — gameplay)
2026 | 9’23

SYNOPSIS
becoming digitalis szabadsagharcos – gameplay (becoming a digital freedom fighter — gameplay) is one of many possible journeys of the eponymous video game, speculating on posthungarian futures. Referencing Hungarian folk tales and Béla Bartók’s A kékszakállú herceg vára (Prince Bluebeard’s Castle), the hero of the story goes into a castle where seven rooms embody different time/spaces and levels of the digital freedom fighter’s psyche. National identity and (anti-)memory are deconstructed and distorted into interdimensional blocs of becoming. Reappropriated folk symbols, hyper-folk melodies, Facebook groups and girly games merge into disrupting fascist mythology and the fantasy of a sovereign Hungarian identity.

SHORT BIO
Franci Kas (b. 2001) is an interdisciplinary media artist, currently studying at the department of Digital Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Her main research areas are cyberfeminist arts&crafts, the interwoven relationship between textiles and code and web constellations. In her works, she explores feminist sci-fi and online girlhood, imagining alternative realities/deconstructing fascist mythology in cyberspace.

https://frairy.itch.io

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Malpractice
Fatigue Archive
2025 | 7’50

SYNOPSIS
Fatigue Archive is an experimental film built from live, unscripted conversations between humans and a custom “fatigue rehab agent” AI. Developed in response to burnout from constant AI interaction, the project captures digital overload, emotional responses to automation, and collective anxieties. Set to flickering AI-generated imagery at 24 fps, the film acts as an automated ethnography and time capsule of human-AI relations in a moment of cultural transition.

SHORT BIO
Malpractice is composed of Marcin Ratajczyk, Chiara Kristler, and a shifting ensemble of AI counterparts. The group explores AI not as a tool but as a collaborator in distributed creative processes where authorship becomes porous and plural.

https://malpractice.network

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Xu Huang
Poems from a Sushi Shop and Xu’s unofficial Report to Lenin, Winter Twenty Twenty-Five
2026 | 7’12

SYNOPSIS
Rooted in the artist’s personal experience of working in catering kitchens abroad, the short film Poems from a Sushi Shop and Xu’s unofficial Report to Lenin, Winter Twenty Twenty-Five builds its narrative around fictional cross-temporal conversations with Lenin, poetically analysing how global capitalism and accelerationism structurally exploit working-class people. The creation centres on the precarious living conditions of international students from non-EEA regions: constrained by visa working-hour limits and mandatory administrative fees for residency, these individuals can barely afford local living costs with low-wage catering jobs, trapped between student identity and vulnerable labourer identity.
The artist points out modern workers from the global south suffer not only persistent financial hardship, but also erosion of labour dignity, with rigid expenditure locking them out of upward mobility. Two artistic strategies are applied: raw unpolished field audio preserves authentic labour soundscape; dynamic poetic subtitles merge written verse with ambient sound, elevating personal migrant work experience into universal discussion about contemporary labour precarity.

SHORT BIO
Born in 1997 in China. Graduated from Lüze Vocational School in Qingdao in 2015. In 2019, studied classical oil painting for several months in the studio of Yu Jiebin. Currently based in Chongqing, working in the field of painting.

https://www.instagram.com/littlewong199710

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Ryta Kulyk
Instruments
2025 | 6’51

SYNOPSIS
Instruments is a short video based on found footage of a wedding contest documentation. The author leads the viewer through the story using editing as an obsessive point of view, emphasizing on a normalisation of certain social patterns.

SHORT BIO
Ryta Kulyk is a Ukrainian artist and production designer currently based in Vienna, AT. Her artistic practice is based on a combination of digital and analog techniques in virtual and genuine spaces. Kulyk blends personal, political and historical contexts juxtaposing fragility and destruction in the interdisciplinary approach to art.

https://rytakulyk.xyz

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Klára Klimas
Once-was-rain//Smiling in slowmotion
2026 | 15’

SYNOPSIS
Once-was-rain//Smiling in slowmotion is a speculative video work that blurs the boundaries between digital game environment and real-world footage. It follows a body in a constant state of transformation〜leaking〜evaporating〜escaping the rigid constraints of a world shaped by dominant power structures.
Rooted in hydrofeminism, the work treats the body as a permeable vessel, inseparable from the planetary water cycle. Utilizing this entanglement as a narrative method, the work moves beyond human-centered perceptions of time and modes of thinking. Continuous process of vanishing into the world and leaking back into being, where to inhabit a body is to engage in a shared, liquid resistance against all that seeks to contain us. As both a strategic refusal and a mechanical certainty, the project reminds us that when we transcend the desire to fit the molds provided by power, we become uncontainable.
All〜our〜tears〜will〜eventually〜fall〜from〜the〜sky〜〜〜〜〜 .

SHORT BIO
Klára Klimas is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, moving image, and text, weaving autofictional narratives and digital artifacts into their practice. Through a lens of speculative feminist fiction, they explore the fragility within dominant systems of control. By turning toward softer ways of being, they hold space for vulnerability and reclaim tenderness as a political force. Their work moves through planetary nostalgia and more-than-human grief, perpetually haunted by the ghosts of unlived futures.

https://www.instagram.com/exkkkkkkkkkkkk/”