Interaction Design

LET'S GET SICK WITH IT!

Anna Lerchbaumer & Kilian Jörg

MA Interaction Design in collaboration with MA Industrial Design
Thursday 27 November 2025
16.00 – 17.00
Zoom
Hosts: Rasa Weber & Lukas Franciszkiewicz

Leached soils, acidified seas, polluted atmospheres. We are haunted by the repressed. We can no longer escape its poison. LET´S GET SICK WITH IT!
What changes when we religiously worship the power of toxicity? Can a cosmic connection be achieved in our time of disaster through a cult of pollution?
The project Toxic Temple by Anna Lerchbaumer and Kilian Jörg is an art-project gone speculative religion that venerates what will outlast us on this planet: plastic waste, nuclear toxins and cemented soils. In long-durational performances and multi-media installations they create shrines for the inner contradictions, absurdities and risks of modern life. Landfills are regarded as the new temples and they propose to inhale the reality of the here and now in a sadistic manner with rituals to unmask the chaos beneath the smooth surface.

Anna Lerchbaumer

explores the intersection of gender, technology, and environmental issues, drawing inspiration from the historical and contemporary dynamics of femininity, domesticity, and the role of technology in shaping—and often obscuring—these narratives. Her approach to sound and sculpture is deeply intertwined, as both disciplines inform one another through processes of transformation, material experimentation, and sensory immersion. Her artistic works have been presented in numerous exhibitions and performances, including Vienna Art Week, Donaufestival, and Steirischer Herbst, as well as in China, India, and Japan. Together with Kilian Jörg, Lerchbaumer co-develops Toxic Temple, a long-term artistic and philosophical project that speculatively engages with themes of waste, pollution, and ritual. The project was published as a book in 2022 by Edition Angewandte / de Gruyter. She is currently university assistent at the University of Art and Design Linz.

annalerchbaumer.com

Kilian Jörg

works both artistically and philosophically on the topic of ecological catastrophe and how its transformative forces can best be imagined and deployed. Previous publications have been on club culture, the political backlash from an ecological perspective, cultivating distance in catastrophic times and a speculative religion of waste. Their current research topics are the car as a metaphor for our toxic entanglements with modern lifestyles (released in book form as “Das Auto und die ökologische Katastrophe” in 2024), the socio-psychological effects of living with ecocide and radical activist strategies of reclaiming land like the ZAD in France (published as "Durchlöchert den Status Quo!" in 2025). Kilian is working both in theory as well as artistic and activist pactise on how to create rituals that enable us to cultivate more complex feelings in time of collapse. They are teaching at the School of Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the program Plastic and Environment at the Art University of Linz. Furthermore, they affiliated to various collectives, among which are the Futurama.Lab, Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration and the CRC Affective Societies at the FU Berlin.

kilianj.org

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The Interfacing Ecologies lecture series explores how interactions take place in more-than-human worlds and how we can access these interactions in the field.
With guests from various disciplines and fields, we ask how we can formulate and put into practice new understandings of interactions in environments and ecologies, and how we might deal with these challenges that are so close to life.

Images: Anna Lerchbaumer & Kilian Jörg