TECHNO WORLDS — FINAL SAMPLING

From April 25 to June 28, 2026, Power Station of Art (PSA), Shanghai, in collaboration with the Department of Culture and Education of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Shanghai will present the exhibition "TECHNO WORLDS — FINAL SAMPLING" (人机迷离——心/身/电/音/社会/采样).

"TECHNO WORLDS" is a five-year touring exhibition project initiated in 2021 by Department of Culture and Education of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic. It engages not only with music itself but also with art, media, technology, identity, and space, presenting divergent narratives and practices across different times and locations.

The project has previously been staged in Budapest, Montreal, New York, Portland, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Montevideo, Zurich, Dresden, Columbus, Kolkata, and Beijing. As the final stop of the tour, the Shanghai edition incorporates further work by Chinese artists, extending and reshaping the interpretive dimensions and meanings of Techno.

"TECHNO WORLDS" is at once a state and a sampling of history that feeds back into the present. The exhibition brings together twenty-three groups of works from different times and places, staging the distinctions and correspondences among people, culture, history, and technology.

On a broader level, these practices gesture toward further questions. Techno is not merely a musical form but a rebellious practice generated within a condition of "speechlessness." It embodies the tension between global narratives and local reinvention, and reveals how technologies that once bore utopian imaginaries have been transformed and thrown into conflict by commercial logics, normative pressures, and social inequality. Within these overlaps, the relationships among subjectivity, identity, and technology are continuously raised rather than conclusively resolved.

This is PSA's first project to focus fully on music and its adjacent cultural domains. At the same time, amid the ongoing evolution of computational technologies represented by artificial intelligence, the human–machine relation is trending toward a steady, efficient, and predictable "smoothing." The exhibition therefore articulates a central concern: a vigilance toward the "smooth." Within this condition, every flicker of subjectivity also constitutes a reflection on, and response to, the relation between technology and the body.

On opening night, the exhibition will additionally present a performance program, "FINAL SAMPLING: Live Sets." The program unfolds in the form of sets. Within a fixed duration, artists will perform live, gradually generating their material through the real-time use and adjustment of sound, rhythm, and related media. The emphasis falls on the process and state of live occurrence, so that each set takes on an openness and singularity that resists repetition. Within this continuously generative scene, Techno is no longer a given form but an experience perpetually perceived and reshaped.

Project Partner: UFO Terminal

Curated by : Mathilde Weh, Justin Hoffmann, Creamcake, Sensend

Exhibition Design: Wu Juehui, Liang Xiaoming