"convulsa" or "The Need for Each Other's Relay"

The Kunstverein in Schwerin is pleased to present Katrin Mayer’s video work *convolsa or The Need for Each Other’s Relay* as part of Culture Night 2026. Katrin Mayer examines the historically shaped gender-specific dimension of coding and writing and uses this as the basis for a visual essay on practices of writing, networking, and collective knowledge. The visual essay stems from her current research project and the resulting publication platform c0da , which explores feminist modes of coding and writing.On the one hand, c0da refers to programming—which was once a female practice—and to the respective female pioneers, their skills, and their stories, which do not appear in official historiography. In parallel, c0da addresses forms of writing that emerged in response to hegemonic masculinity. Katrin Mayer proposes the figure of zero as a recurring motif. It belongs to computer code, but also to the “zerological subject,” a concept developed by Julia Kristeva and later revived by Eva Meyer. Here, identity, the self, and writing are viewed as movements and practices that elude binary logic and do not submit to the sign. Furthermore, the zero possesses the malleable capacity to transform itself into the letter O, a circle, a hole, a bowl, a dot, the West Arabic 5: ٥, the Turkish pronoun “O,” an ellipse, a Möbius strip, and into Anna Cairns’s gender symbol in her writing for c0da. Furthermore, the visual essay reflects on shared potentials inherent in the idea of the web and which also play a role in the politics of feminist writing, such as: polyphonic voices, intertextual appropriations, an interest in automatic writing, collaborative research rather than genius, translation processes, an affinity for subjects that are not singular, sociality, web and networking skills, glitches, and a topological conception of thought and space.

At 7:00 p.m., the artist talk “Software / Hardware – Soft Ware / Hard Ware” will take place with artist Katrin Mayer and curator Lisa Dohmstreich. Accompanying the screening is a web-to-print publication of Katrin Mayer’s video essay.