Daniel Hafner, dialogue(s) : reflecting on all things merely experienced

At the core of Daniel Hafner’s artistic practice lies a sustained inquiry into perception, mediated experience, and the shifting conditions of reality in the digital age.

His works operate at the intersection of gesture and code, of bodily sensation and algorithmic abstraction. Through subtle sculptural interventions and conceptual apparatuses, Hafner interrogates how sensory experiences—seeing, hearing, feeling—are transformed through technology and how these transformations, in turn, shape our understanding of presence and being.

His artistic investigations often begin with analog phenomena such as hand-drawn gestures or acoustic tones, which are translated into digital vector graphics, only to be re-materialized into physical objects or spatial installations. This recursive movement between manual and digital processes reveals structural correspondences between visual and sonic systems—between the drawn line and the recorded soundwave—suggesting a shared semiotic logic. Hafner’s seemingly simple perceptual devices act as precise instruments of disruption, dismantling normative sensory frameworks and foregrounding the constructed nature of experience.


Daniel Hafner and Monika Pessler (Eds.)