As part of Kulturnacht 2026, the Kunstverein in Schwerin is pleased to present Katrin Mayer’s video work convulsa or The Need for Each Other’s Relay. Katrin Mayer explores the historically shaped gendered dimensions of coding and writing, developing a visual essay on practices of writing, networking, and collective knowledge. The visual essay draws on 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 its female pioneers, their skills, and their stories, which do not appear in official historiography. At the same time, c0da addresses modes 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 subordinate themselves to the sign.Moreover, the zero possesses the plastic ability to transform 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 Anna Cairns’s gender symbol in her typeface for c0da. The visual essay also reflects on the shared potentials inherent in the idea of the web, which play a role in the politics of feminist writing: 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 19:00, an artist talk titled Software / Hardware – weiche Ware / harte Ware, held in German, will take place with the artist Katrin Mayer and the curator Lisa Dohmstreich. Accompanying the screening, a web-to-print publication of Katrin Mayer’s video essay will be released.