Book promotion
Presentation of the essay This is Not an Image by Nora O’Murchú
and Girl Intelligence by Alex Quicho
followed by a discussion with the authors,
moderated by Guy Mackinnon-Little
30 April 2026 at 7 PM UK time
Newspeak House, London
Not all forms of power announce themselves. Some move quietly, shaping how we feel, act and inhabit the world. Increasingly, the logic of software reshapes participation by distributing control across interfaces and automating governance through the systems that sort, guide, and render us visible. Are You a Software Update? brings together seven authors to examine the intensifying form of totalitarianism grounded in the quiet background logic of contemporary technology.
Alberto Toscano, Alex Quicho, Nora O’ Murchú, Noura Tafeche, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne and Wassim Z. Alsindi explore how infrastructures built for scale, extraction and control have come to embody this totalising logic. They show how platforms stabilise sentiment, how images perform order and how data becomes the medium through which consent is manufactured and dissent is neutralised. Their essays reveal a world governed by calibration – a fascist tendency expressed through the everyday management of attention, emotion and presence.
EN | 10,5 x 16,7 cm | 192 pp | BW | soft cover | 2025
ISBN 978-961-7173-66-6
Copies of the book will be available at a discounted price during the event.
Standard price: €20 (17,4 GBP) | at the event: €17 (14,9 GBP)
Given the urgency of the topics covered and in order to ensure the widest possible circulation, on the occasion of the presentation of the book Are You a Software Update? in London, the editorial team has decided to make the essay They Build to Dominate, or Fascism in the Age of Its Digital Reproducibility by Alberto Toscano available free of charge in PDF format.
Participants
Nora O’ Murchú is a curator and researcher whose work explores how digital infrastructures shape culture and politics. Her curatorial practice investigates how technological systems organise power, extract value and condition collective life. She has curated internationally, including at Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Seoul Museum of Art. She is a professor at the University of Limerick and was Artistic Director of transmediale (2020–2024). She is currently developing How to Read an Image for FACT Liverpool, a major exhibition project.
Alex Quicho is a theorist and research director based in London. Her practice spans critical writing, performative lectures and the moving image, focusing on how emerging technologies warp social reality and vice versa. She studied critical writing at the Royal College of Art and teaches narrative theory for MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins. Her work has appeared in Wired, Frieze, Dazed, Vogue, Spike, The Face, MIT Tech Review and more. https://amfq.xyz
Guy Mackinnon-Little is a London-based writer, editor, and egregore wrangler. He is a former editor of TANK Magazine and Zora Zine and currently an associate lecturer at University of the Arts London. He consults professionally on editorial and narrative strategy, with collaborators including Other Internet, RadicalxChange, Antikythera, 0xParc, and Giza. His personal research tracks the evolution of language, culture, and other computational media from the paleolithic onwards.
CREDITS
Production of the event:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana and Newspeak House, London, 2026