What does it mean to look at a place through a touristic lens - and what might it mean to subvert that gaze?
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‍Digital Journeys brings together the outcomes of a semester - long seminar with media art students from the HfG Karlsruhe, who approached the city of Freiburg as both site and subject of research. Engaging with the themes of Biennale für Freiburg 3, the students navigated the city not just as observers, but as speculative worldbuilders, rethinking what tourism can reveal, obscure, or invent.

This online exhibition unfolds from a one-day field trip to Freiburg, where students explored the visual culture, urban rhythms, and historical textures that shape the city’s presence within the broader economy of wanderlust. Inspired by concepts such as touristification, leisure rituals, and fictional geographies, the resulting works investigate how narratives of place are crafted, consumed, and contested. Rather than reproducing the picturesque or the expected, they open up space for uncertainty, irony, and invention.

Set against the backdrop of HAPPY PLACE — an exhibition that questions the seductive surfaces and deeper consequences of tourism — Digital Journeys offers a parallel cartography of impressions and interventions. Each work acts as a fragment within a larger narrative that resists the totalizing logic of travel brochures and Instagrammable landmarks. From speculative travel guides to digital rituals and fictional souvenirs, these projects reimagine the role of the tourist not as a consumer of place, but as an active participant in its ongoing transformation.

This exhibition is not a map of Freiburg, but a layered, unstable journey through its mediated traces — an invitation to see differently, to question what is shown, and to imagine what lies just outside the frame.