Collective
Agency in
an Era of Authoritarian Automation

Stefan Jonsson & Anna Ådahl

Collective Agency in an Era of Authoritarian Automation is a practice-based project in artistic research conducted by professor and writer Stefan Jonsson and postdoc researcher and visual artist Anna Ådahl.

Will democracy survive the 21st century? Through artistic practices, experimental writing, and theoretical dialogue, we explore how authoritarian automated regimes shape today’s social terrain.
Our bodies become data through multiple harvesting and image-based scanning processes. Our common life is constrained by computational technologies aligned with political agendas and market strategies that defy democratic values.

Yet, even though it appears that our agency as individuals and collectives is curtailed if not eradicated by digital technologies and algorithmic models that monitor, manipulate, exploit, and extract value from our minds, bodies, and actions in ways we are not even aware of, it would be a mistake to assume that our capacity for common action and democratic participation cannot break out in consequential collective forms.

Our aim is to aesthetically identify and portray how embodied subjective agency and collective assembly interrupt processes of algorithmic modelling and automation. Making abstract processes
concrete, we demonstrate how collective agency, even as it is absorbed by digital platforms built to surveil and exploit, persists as a political force,

Collective Agency is funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council.

Untitled (relief), 2025
Large size, work in progress
Anna Ådahl
Symposium, 26th May
Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
Full Program
Capture/ Emergence
Scattered Notes on Collective Agency
Text by Stefan Jonsson

Iris (sculpture), 2025
Work in progress
Anna Ådahl
On Art and Political Imaginaries Lecture at the Research Annual of the Center for Art and the Political Imaginary
Text by Stefan Jonsson

Iris Barcode (banner), 2025
Anna Ådahl

Porous bodies (detail of film)
Realised with the help of Martin Christensen
Anna Ådahl
2025

Arms and Hands (collage)
Anna Ådahl
Palm vein (drawing), 2025
Anna Ådahl

Writing Collective Agency -Work in Progress
Text by Stefan Jonsson
Feet moving in Ghatak: cinematic gesture, political emergence, and the subconscious of migration
Text by Stefan Jonsson

Design by
Jordana Loeb & Anna Ådahl

© 2025
Anna Ådahl & Stefan Jonsson