Electronic Habitat "Borderhack 3.0" 

Denim de Lux Padded Cell version

STATION ROSE (Elisa Rose & Gary Danner), 2001/2026

Media sculpture at the Donaucitykirche         
Position + group exhibition          June 12 – July 5, 2026 incl. game

Borderhack means: hacking borders — in the real and in the virtual.

Since 2001, the series has been negotiating the political dimension of borders: territorial borders that exclude people, and digital borders — firewalls, access restrictions, controlled data spaces, gatekeepers.

The padded cell is both at once: shelter and confinement, refuge and isolation. It is a walk-in, usable sculpture with Augmented Reality (Artivive). A room within a room — a deliberate pleonasm: a retreat inside a silent sacred place, surrounded by high-rises. The Donaucitykirche sits right by the grounds of the Vienna International Centre (V.I.C., the former "UNO City") — where borders are negotiated internationally, the walk-in cell of computer-stitched denim closes around its visitors: a cloister within the church, soft, padded, digitally permeated.

A QR code stitched onto denim opens the generative audio-visual work "borderhack2026", which functions like a game (sound: Gary Danner) — physical textile and digital signal space intertwine.
Vibe coding. borderhack2026 transposes the operation of hacking borders into its own mode of making: the work is vibe-coded — dialogically generated, at the threshold between artistic intent and machinic execution. With it, the inherited border between author and apparatus, between concept and compilation, collapses.

For STATION ROSE this marks no rupture but a continuity: already the research commission for the Austrian Ministry of Science on "Virtual Reality as a New Border" (1991/92) carried the border in its very title — and resulted in a first CD-ROM. Further CD-ROMs followed from 1992 onward, and their own hand-coded HTML website from 1995, for which STATION ROSE received the Prix Ars Electronica (Honorary Mention, WWW category).

Coding in its present, dialogical form follows directly from this lineage. Tellingly, the term itself is currently negotiating its own border — between euphoric promise and critical disillusion, between "vibe coding" and whatever succeeds it. The next form is not yet settled: the work deliberately situates itself on this threshold, in a method still in the making, a border in motion.

The work negotiates a further border — between city and country, signal and nature: the material for the AR video and sound of borderhack2026 emerged during the first atelier session of the year, on May 24, 2026, at the STATION ROSE atelier — a 12th-century chapel in the Weinviertel region of Lower Austria. Digital Land Art in the sense of the STR concept "Nature Is Cool" — itself a Gifani on the WELL website of 1995/96, and thus part of the STR vocabulary for over three decades. What was recorded in the rural setting returns into the urban high-rise context of the Donau City.

The method is not merely a means of production but part of the statement: a work about hacking borders that subverts the very border of coding itself. Form and content coincide — and the work refuses to stand still: like the borders it interrogates, borderhack2026 is conceived to keep regenerating.

The Electronic Habitat series begins in 2001 with Borderhack 2.0, a liveSTReam from the Frankfurt studio as a contribution to the event of the same name in Tijuana, Mexico..

For the media congress 9.11. Netzwerke at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt (2002), curated by STATION ROSE, the duo developed the REmaterialization through Electronic Habitats. Further stations followed at Galerie Detterer Frankfurt, O.K. Centrum Linz, Galerie DAM Berlin (2004/2005), MuseumsQuartier Vienna (2013), and most recently Spark Art Fair (2025) — and in 2026 the arc comes full circle at the Donaucitykirche.

The digital signal is the message.

Since 1988.