The second AMRO Research Lab of 2025 deals with the Politics of Isolation and involves the artist and researcher Anna Kraher.
Anna Kraher (she/her) is a researcher working at the intersection of art, technologies, and societies. In her work, she explores the ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence, data justice, and the speculation on just futures. Her current research focuses on the relationships between predictive technologies, temporalities, and power dynamics. Before joining the Ethics and Critical Theories of Artificial Intelligence research group at the University of Osnabrück, she has been part of the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University and the non-profit organization AlgorithmWatch. She holds an M.A. in Design & Computation (University of the Arts Berlin/Technical University Berlin), and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Gender Studies (Humboldt University of Berlin).
Anna participated in the 2024 AMRO Festival with a contribution about Techronologies Predictive Temporalities in Technocapitalism -> https://radical-openness.org/en/programm/2024/techronologies
Within the 2025 Research Lab Anna works on two main threads: on one side the research about predictive temporalities in tech, on the other side the wider construct of the politics of isolation, seen as ideology shared among several Silicon Valley CEOs and also has concrete influence on the ways these people want to realize through tech a specific vision of the future – also for the rest of the world.
"Homeland is more than a place; it’s the narration of an ideal that often excludes those who don’t fit that ideal. As a collective narrative, it shapes our vision of living together and is thereby also an imagination and negotiation of the future. Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian visions position exploitative and isolationist futures as the only possible option — future becomes an exodus from co-presence. A vision of privately owned cities and space colonization, in which the global elite abandons any notion of solidarity-based co-habitation. In contrast, the idea of staying requires the preservation of a collectively habitable world, where we have the right to remain present and to be at home."
Over the course of the year, Anna participated with a lecture on Politics of Isolation in the FMR 26 festival.
During a residency in July, her current work in progress video "Road to Futures Past" was presented to the servus community for feedback, and an video installation exploring the aesthetics connected to the Politics of Isolation was conceptualized and prototyped.
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The AMRO Research Lab is a research process with artists from the AMRO/servus community and develops between the AMRO editions as part of the cultural program of servus.at
It is funded by the yearly funding of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport, as well as Land Oberösterreich and Linz Kultur.