UBERMORGEN

Overview

UBERMORGEN is a Swiss-Austrian artist duo founded in 1995 by lizvlx (Liz Haas, also credited as Liz Katlein) and Hans Bernhard (Luzius Bernhard). Emerging from the vibrant net.art scene in Vienna, the pair has carved a singular path as media hackers and conceptual provocateurs who fuse digital intervention with high-stakes social experimentation. They maintain bases in Basel, the alpine village of S-chanf near St. Moritz, and Vienna, where their practice continues to evolve across borders and platforms.[1]

The duo’s public persona blends lizvlx’s autistic actionist intensity with Bernhard’s pragmatic visionary drive, a synthesis that has propelled them from underground net.art experiments into institutional recognition. Both have taught at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and now hold the professorship for Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, leading its Digital Arts department since 2023. Their trajectory reflects a relentless commitment to converting code, language, and aesthetics into tools for interrogating power structures in the networked age.[1]

Artistic Style & Medium

UBERMORGEN’s practice operates at the razor’s edge of conceptual art, software art, and tactical media, deploying websites, custom code, and online platforms as primary media. Their works often manifest as “haute couture websites”—polished, seductive digital interfaces that mask subversive operations—and extend into physical installations, text-based NFTs, and performative actions. This hybrid approach transforms the internet itself into both canvas and battlefield, where glitches, hacks, and viral mechanics become aesthetic and political weapons.

The duo favors a dark, ironic visual language laced with corporate mimicry and absurdist branding. Early projects exploited the raw mechanics of the web; later works incorporate machine learning processes, data visualizations, and fashion-inflected objects. Their signature “rot” aesthetic—evoking decay, revolution, and raw digital flesh—appears across projects, finished with what their X bio describes as a “Dark AI sheen.” This style refuses clean resolution, instead reveling in paradox, instability, and the friction between human agency and algorithmic systems.[2]

Influences & Themes

Deeply rooted in the 1990s net.art avant-garde and the legacy of etoy (of which Bernhard was a founder), UBERMORGEN draws from tactical media pioneers who weaponized the internet against corporate and state power. Influences include Peter Weibel’s media theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and broader currents of conceptual art that prioritize idea over object. Their work echoes Situationist détournement while updating it for the platform era, treating data flows and corporate platforms as raw material for critique.

Recurring themes revolve around the commodification of democracy, the cannibalistic logic of big tech, surveillance, and the porous boundary between art and activism. Projects probe how digital systems shape desire, consumption, and political agency, often staging “polarizing social experiments” that draw global audiences into complicity. The duo consistently interrogates the body’s entanglement with code—lizvlx’s autistic actionism foregrounding neurodivergent perspectives—while Bernhard’s strategic framing exposes the pragmatic machinery behind radical gestures.[2]

Notable Works & Exhibitions

Among their most notorious works is Vote-Auction (2000), an online platform that allowed voters to sell their ballots during the U.S. presidential election, attracting CNN’s label “Maverick Austrian Business People” and scrutiny from the FBI, CIA, and NSA while reaching an estimated 500 million people. The EKMRZ Trilogy (2005) comprises Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, and The Sound of eBay—conceptual hacks that turned the business models of internet giants against themselves through automated data extraction and redistribution.[2]

More recent projects include the 2022 UBERMORGEN Slogans series of text NFTs and the 2023 PMC Wagner Art commission for KW Berlin. Their exhibition history spans the Whitney Museum, New Museum (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Serpentine Galleries (London), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Ars Electronica, Biennale of Sydney, and numerous international venues including the Haifa Museum of Art and ArtScience Museum Singapore. They occupy more than 175 domains and maintain an active archive that underscores their status as net.art pioneers with a global footprint.[2]

Impact & Recognition

UBERMORGEN’s interventions have reshaped discourse around digital sovereignty and artistic hacking, proving that net-based work can command mainstream attention and institutional validation without sacrificing edge. Their projects have prompted legal and corporate responses, demonstrating art’s capacity to expose systemic vulnerabilities. Publications dedicated to their oeuvre, including monographs edited by Domenico Quaranta and Alessandro Ludovico, cement their place in art-historical narratives of media art.[1]

As professors and mentors, they continue to influence a new generation of digital artists, while their ongoing practice—spanning NFTs, machine-learning collaborations such as The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (with Leonardo Impett and Joasia Krysa at the Whitney), and evolving online experiments—ensures their relevance in an era of algorithmic governance. Their legacy lies in demonstrating that the internet remains a contested terrain where aesthetic daring and political audacity can still collide to transformative effect.

References