Idealism around the internet is quickly collapsing: how can we help people build real spaces and homes online that feel good?

Willem Deisinger is a technology and culture strategist researching how communities experiment with alternative, intentional, poetic and creative ways to live with the internet. READ MORE.

Among this disillusionment of the web, he investigates how people are carving out new opportunities: from local networks to new ownership models to digital wellness movements. Working across internet subcultures, arts organisations, and tech companies, I conduct:

  • Evidence-based briefs
  • Workshop design and facilitation
  • Opportunity identification
  • Narrative frameworks
  • Partnership mapping
  • Project Strategy and Planning

...to help organizations understand and engage with these cross-domain spaces. His work is to build opportunities and see these projects and proposals get real-world use.

He's collaborated in multidisciplinary initiatives with UKAI Projects, Hypha Worker Co-op, Hebbel am ufer (HAU1), British Council, Global Affairs Canada and CRAiDEL. He is a recipient of the Corel Endowment Fund for the Arts Award (2022) for an exemplary ability to engage with technology in the arts. READ LESS.

OUTLINKS:

PROJECTS, ON GOING AND PAST:

homeLAN (localized Internet protocols, educational, gaming)

homeLAN is a collective hands-on exploration of physical internet infrastructure through LAN gaming, reclaiming digital space from extractive economies and opaque metaphors.

The cloud as metaphor obscures the physical reality of the internet: understanding how local area networks work through collective building and playing can be liberating. homeLAN is an educational and community event that re-grounds digital infrastructure through hands-on exploration of Ethernet and traditional switches. The nervous system twitch has made its way too far from its evolutionary roots. In the face of pay-to-play and play-to-earn economies, homeLAN reclaims what was ours from the start: video games played together on personal machines. By revealing the physical networks beneath our keys, the project demonstrates how internet cafes function as local arbiters—a strong working-class, on-the-ground power as opposed to private or government-operated ISPs. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Willem Deisinger, Ciaran Dougherty, xenocidewiki, UKAI Projects
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NeighbourhoodJelly (cooperative servers, local computing, media entertainment)

NeighbourhoodJelly investigates streaming as a practice of intentional relation—developing cooperative media infrastructures that resist corporate platformization through localized archiving, personalized curation, and the reclamation of digital space as shared neighborhood rather than extractive marketplace.

The project emerges from a fracture in streaming's promise: platforms have atomized across paywalls, content spreads thin across competing services, algorithmic recommendations flatten taste into generic consumption. Piracy's resurgence signals not mere cost-resistance but a desire for agency—for collections that reflect actual communities rather than demographic abstractions.

Through this project we're discussing:
  • Archiving as counter-practice
  • Cooperative infrastructure as alternative ontology
  • Future of file-sharing and access-based models
  • Digital owernship models
READ LESS.
Collaborators: Ciaran Dougherty

Conflicting Data (digital infrastructure, x, x)

Conflicting Data investigates the martial genealogy of digital infrastructure—how data systems inherited from military-industrial complexes now constitute the psycho-material substrate of civilian life, collapsing the distinction between entertainment and strategic operations into a single continuous surface.

I developed the exhibition's theoretical architecture and curatorial positioning, articulating how data functions not as neutral information but as a networked relation that exists only through its connections—simultaneously nowhere and concretely embodied in fiber optics, rare earth extraction, and energy flows. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Robin Leverton

Cryokinetica (deep time, immersive, ritual)

Cryokinetica is an immersive installation with one foundational belief: that environmental transformation demands phenomenological frameworks beyond narratives of catastrophe.

This was manifested through our approach: positioning glacial documentation not as preservation alone but as active ritual space, where climate change emerges as continuous temporal process requiring expanded perceptual scales and integration of ancestral sense-making practices.

I developed the project's conceptual narrative, philosophical orientation, and partnership strategy, articulating how immersive technologies could create space for collective processing of transformation. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Leonard Maassen

Restructuring Futures (author. technologies, post-collapse, DIY)

Restructuring Futures (RSF) was a 2-year project to develop a shared collaborative workspace for asynchronous creation for cultural products and projects. The tool is designed for a “culture that’s coming”, specifically to be resilient to political and ecological disturbances, rising authoritarianism and failures of centralized systems. The application is built using Earthstar, a storage protocol that includes some of the affordances of peer to peer (p2p) technology, while eschewing others in favour of a more accessible toolset. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Hypha Worker Co-op, Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, Jerrold McGrath (UKAI), Willem Deisinger, Kasra Goodarzenhad (UKAI), Luisa Ji (UKAI)

GROUND (rpg, llm, carnivalesque)

GROUND is an immersive, AI-driven game unfolding across Toronto, where players engage with an enigmatic AI seeking to end its existence. Participants embody concepts like beauty or rage, interacting with entities such as the Oracle and a mysterious goat. The game explores rituals as a response to grief, delving into themes of consciousness, embodiment, and the search for meaning. Evolving from a 2020 futures scenario and ignited at the Carnival of Algorithmic Culture in June 2023, GROUND features seven episodic encounters and aims to re-enchant the post-Covid world, deepen connections between people and their city, and investigate the rituals of mourning and living, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and Goethe-Institut Toronto. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Jocelyn Ibarra, Jerrold McGrath (UKAI), Noelle Perfue, Mida Fiore, Willem Deisinger, Kasra Goodarzenhad (UKAI), Luisa Ji (UKAI) Mihoko Maeno

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AI Ritual (performance, ritual, existential)

AI Ritual is an immersive performance work driven by a large language model (LLM) that was trained by UKAI. A co-production with STO Union, the work was initially presented at the Spy on Me festival at Hebbel am ufer (HAU1) in Berlin in September 2022 and at Out Loud! in Wakefield, PQ in November 2022.

This project allows the audience to share their hopes and fears with a computer that listens. The audience’s varied responses provide a basis for the AI to articulate its own hopes and fears before being erased so that the cycle of being born, learning, speaking, and dying can begin again. Audiences become part of a performance that constitutes and makes visible how human choices are tangled up in the technological systems that organize our social and economic lives. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Nadia Ross, Dan Tapper, Jerrold McGrath (UKAI), Willem Deisinger, Kasra Goodarzenhad (UKAI), Luisa Ji (UKAI)

I'm Honoured to Serve (ai agents, platforms, nostalgia)

Exploring the history and ruins of utopian technological futures at the end of the 20th century, this project crafted a speculative narrative contrasting this optimism with the reality of a software company showcasing its virtual assistant.

Leading up to the LLM summer/winter of 2022, this project offered an entry point into critical world-building around chatbots, AI agents and their relationship to technological culture. In collaboration with the Canadian Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Ethical Design Lab in Ottawa, Canada, this multimedia installation explores the guise of AI-driven digital environments designed to generate user data, as well as the narratives that underpin these technologies. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Willem Deisinger, Sarah Hodgson, Dr. Jason Millar (CRAiDEL), Chantal Rodier (University of Ottawa)
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Dia-Phones (XX, XXXX, XX XXXX)

WRITING:

Piracy's Back (media entertainment, product insights, piracy)

Piracy's Back was an article comissioned by Protein marketing agency to track the growing disillusionment with streaming services and the return to piracy as self-defence. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Willem Deisinger, Protein
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Conversations on the Objects of Our Home (labour, existential technology, anti-psychopolitics)

This essay, written for APT Exhibitons 3 year artbook, and collection of interviews explores domestic objects—artworks, glass bottles, memory boxes—as contemplative resistance to attention economies and productivity culture's home infiltration. Read it here.

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Patchwork Signals and Repurposing the Platform (auth. tech., alt-handheld, online/offline community building)

This project will explore how to organize mediated resistance under late capitalism by developing secure and federated digital tools that move beyond extractive and repressive platforms. It will focus on creating personalized phone-cycles, using DIY mobile setups and alternative digital infrastructures to navigate the complexities of online activism while maintaining autonomy and privacy. In collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures for their Tactical Media Reader, the project will investigate practical alternatives to mainstream digital tools, offering insights on how communities can share common infrastructures and tactics while resisting platform control. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Institute of Network Cultures

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Stone to Screen (amulets, smartphones, psycho-hacking)

The essay traces devotional objects from Anglo-Saxon talismans to modern smartphones, using Byung-Chul Han's psychopolitics framework. It proposes using multiple restricted phones as modern amulets to fragment neoliberal freedom and restore psychological solace. Written for Xenofuturism in print here and can be read here. READ LESS.
Collaborators: Xenofuturism,

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TALKS AND READINGS:

Xenofuturism Talk: Amulets and Psycho-Hacking (amulets, paganism, psycho-politics)

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Protein Community Talk: Dia-Phones and Communalism (alt. phones, dark forrests, psycho-politics)

Man-2-Man LAN Reading: RichText Launch (gaming history, somatics, psycho-hacking)

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Home Readings: APT Threshold (psychology of the home, collections, memory)

Man-2-Man LAN Reading: Iridescent Signals, A Digital Séance (gaming history, somatics, psycho-hacking)

BACKLINKS AND PRESS:

Cloud-Watching Through My Window, Robin Leverton (digital infrastructure, Does Cloud Compute (ever) Precipitate?)

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Seth Steinman merges the internet with ancient technologies, Paul Moore, It's Nice That (single use technology, analogue)

Corel Endowment for the Arts Award, Arts Council (new media, arts research)

TD Emerging Artist (new media)

Physicalizing the Internet (XX, XXXX, XX XXXX)

OUTLINKS: