A FOUR-DAY TRANSFORMATIVE RETREAT INTO RADICAL PRESENCE

We live inside acceleration with feeds, forecasts, avatars and optimization loops ruling our lived environment. The present moment dissolves into constant transmission where our identies become interfaces and attention a currency. THE EXTREME NOW interrupts that condition and throws each participant back to it’s existence in a mortal body.

Guided by artist and researcher Christiane Peschek, this transformative retreat confronts contemporary existence at its core: the merging of transhumanist fantasies, internet-based spiritualisms, self-optimization culture, and algorithmic conditioning. Rather than rejecting these forces, the retreat places them under examination in the body, in relationship and in real time.

Limited to seven participants, the experience unfolds within a rigorously composed structure of silence, guided contemplations, biographical inquiry, somatic grounding, and ritualized transitions. The format is intimate and exact with each element designed to destabilize mediated identity and re-anchor perception in lived presence.

Christiane Peschek defines hyper presence as a radical state of immediacy where perception is sharpened and time becomes again an embodied experience. To enter a state of hyper presence, acknowledging impermanence is an unavoidable practice. In an algorithmic world that promises endless continuity, this recognition becomes subversive.

THE EXTREME NOW is not a wellness retreat, nor a self-improvement program. It is a transformative self-experience in the truest sense: a recalibration of how we inhabit our first body, our relationships, and our temporal existence within digital culture.

No prior experience is required except the openness, readiness and commitment to the entire retreat time. This retreat is not about disconnecting from the world, it is about returning to it, embodied, aware, and fully present.

In this talk, Christiane Peschek speaks from within her lived experience with an algorithmic heartbeat. Grounded in the reality of cardiac implant technology, she approaches bionic existence not as metaphor, but as a materially sustained condition in which survival is continuously monitored, regulated, and corporately maintained.

Departing from A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, Peschek revisits the cyborg beyond theory, as clinical infrastructure. When life depends on code, batteries, updates, and supply chains, empowerment narratives fracture, embodiment becomes physically dependent, emotionally recalibrated, economically entangled, and ontologically distributed across human and non-human systems.

In response, she proposes an ironic inversion of Haraway’s statement by reframing it to  “I would rather be a goddess than a cyborg” – a counter-myth naming the longing for continuity and sacred meaning within algorithmic life. In her talk she reframes vulnerability not as deficit, but as the decisive resource for rethinking care, agency, and survival in late technoscientific capitalism.

The talk will be held in Cooperation with Vienna Collectors Club and the Austrian Embassy Seoul