Becoming Image

Screening programme
12 May 2026 at 19.00
Slovenian Cinematheque, Ljubljana

Featuring works by
Nina Davies, Kieran Nolan, Eriko Miyata, Simone C Niquille, Akihiko Taniguchi, Mark Dorf

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

and of the 6the edition of VFX Ljubljana – Festival of Experimental Audiovisual Practices

Becoming Image explores the blurring boundaries between lived realities and digital images, tracing the feedback loops between visual representation and algorithmic operations. Through short films, video art, and video essays, the screenings reveal how the construction of identities, experiences, and environments is increasingly governed by the image, and by the computational systems that produce it.

The works gathered here ask what it means to exist in a world where visibility is conditional: where images do not merely reflect reality but actively determine what is allowed to exist and who is permitted to have a voice. Questions of labour, belonging, authenticity, and resistance surface across the programme, as artists navigate a landscape in which the image has become both infrastructure and ideology – shaping not only how we appear, but how we move, speak, and are recognised.

Drawing on a wide range of imaging technologies and approaches, from CGI to generative AI, the works expose the pervasive and uneven power of the image in shaping contemporary life. Critical, playful and poetic, the projects are also attentive to the ways bodies and communities adapt, perform, and push back against the demands of computational vision and the recent emergence of machine realism. They propose strategies for inhabiting, subverting, and (re)claiming a world that has become, increasingly, an effect of its own representation.

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Nina Davies
Precursing (2024)
11’12’’

Synopsis

Precursing explores a world shaped by rapidly accelerating technologies, where systems designed to predict the future are increasingly embedded in everyday life. From finance and law to transport and insurance, artificial intelligence is relied upon to model outcomes with precision—yet similar technologies also surface in unexpected spaces, from social media algorithms to the uncanny detection of “ghosts.” While some of these systems depend on rigorous, verifiable data, others operate within looser, more speculative frameworks.

Drawing on predictive models trained in fictional environments such as video games, Precursing reflects on contemporary digital culture, including viral trends like non-player character (NPC) performances on TikTok. These repetitive, scripted gestures are framed as a subconscious response to a present shaped by algorithmic anticipation—a subtle resistance to lives increasingly governed by prediction.

At the centre of the film is a fictional incident involving a self-driving car trained to anticipate human movement. Through two interwoven conversations between four characters, the narrative unfolds into a wider meditation on ghosts, ritual, and the future of justice. Blurring the boundaries between simulation and reality, Precursing questions what it means to act freely in a world where the future is constantly being calculated in advance.

Biography

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Previous research projects have included the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Her work explores how popular dance trends mimic digital misrepresentations of the human body, using glitchy and repetitive movement as a choreographic vernacular that tests how bodies are read, captured, and circulated by technological systems. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been shown at venues such as Tate Britain, V&A Museum, Somerset House, and the Photographers Gallery. In 2021, she co-founded Future Artefacts FM, an artist-run program that showcases artists working with speculative fiction for broadcast.

Kieran Nolan
Games That Don’t Exist
40’’,

Synopsis

AI Machinima uses generative AI to create video scenes in the style of immersive 3D game environments, instead of directly using a game engine for their production. They are “paratexts sans texts” (Bittanti 2025). Video Game That Don’t Exist (Nolan 2025) is a series of vignettes and short stories edited together from 5 second clips generated with text prompts in Open AI’s Sora (2024). The online video training base of the AI model is revealed through unintended extra details, for example the superimposing of game streamers into the scene. Gen AI’s current limits are also exposed through animation glitches where movements blend and contort in an unpredictable manner.

Rather than attempt to edit out these anomalies, AI’s unpredictable factors are embraced. In Video Games That Don’t Exist we see a mix of the familiar and the absurd channeled through the aesthetic constraints of Sora’s training data, as humans and farm vehicles merge and dislocate akin to the atoms of the old man and his bicycle from Flann O’ Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967). Sora’s linguistically agnostic text sometimes makes partial sense, like a type of AI Esperanto, contributing a surreal language neutral layer. Borrowing from the philosophy of circuit bending pioneer Reed Ghazala, these accidental glitches aren’t considered bugs in the context of Video Games That Don’t Exist, but an integral feature of the work.

Biography

Kieran Nolan is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and lecturer working across interactive art, games, and creative technologies. He is Co-Director of the Creative Arts Research Centre at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT). His practice spans interactive art, game-based media, and digital visual culture, including AI-driven machinima, immersive networked XR, graffiti archiving in and through video games, and platform preservation. He is WG1 Lead for COST Action 21141 (Grassroots of Digital Europe) and Co-President of the History of Games International Conference. He is also co-editor of the upcoming collected edition Silicon Dawn: Histories and Cultures of Creative Computing in Europe (1970-2000) (De Gruyter Brill, 2026).

Eriko Miyata
My soul gem is dull color
1’58’’

Synopsis

In Japan, there exists a method that blends military themes with pop culture elements. This approach did not develop as a military strategy but rather as a genre within subculture. Meanwhile, a societal phenomenon is currently unfolding where real military organizations are incorporating the aesthetics of pop culture. A representative example of this is the influence of the game “Kantai Collection” (Kancolle). This game has had a significant impact, extending to the sale of themed food products in convenience stores, the creation of an anime series, and collaborative events with the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Within this subculture,there is pronounced tendency to anthropomorphize weapons as female characters, reflecting a distinct bias. Children growing up in Japan are regularly exposed to magical girl anime stories that depict young girls who need to be “saved” or “rescued.” However, escaping the signals directly tied to military influence, as well as the male gaze and the violence it entails, proves extremely difficult. This work aims to visualize these societal dynamics and the perspectives directed toward women.

Biography

Eriko Miyata is a Japanese-born artist and photographer based in Switzerland, currently completed a Master’s in Photography at ECAL (2023–2025). Previously, she earned a Master’s in Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts (2018–2020) and a Bachelor’s in Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts (2012–2017).

Her work explores contemporary photographic and multimedia practices, often combining digital and analog approaches to question perception, memory, and visual storytelling. She has received multiple scholarships and awards, such as the Pola Foundation Scholarship for Young Artists Abroad, the Ina Nobuo Prize, and was a finalist for Prix Photoforum. She has also held solo and group exhibitions across Europe and Asia, reflecting a research-driven and experimental approach to photography and visual media.

Simone C Niquille
Elephant Juice (2020)
8’45’’

Synopsis

In the short film Elephant Juice the bat contemplates: “Our own experience provides the basic material for our perception of the world, which is therefore limited.” Modelled after philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’, the film’s narrator paraphrases this passage to ponder on the probability of human built computer vision systems ever surpassing their maker’s subjective worldview.

Elephant Juice takes place in a bathroom and follows a character as they prepare for an upcoming automated job interview. In this novel recruiting process, interviews are held in front of a candidate’s own webcamera. Once recorded the video file is analyzed by computer vision software to evaluate the applicant’s facial expressions on desirable qualities such as trustworthiness, compatibility and diligence. Such examination translates facial expressions into emotions and depends on a mapping of muscle movements. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) proposed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in 1978 is widely referred to as underlying parameter for such applications. It divides the human face into action areas that are labeled and subsequently assigned emotions. Since it’s introduction in the 70’s FACS has been broadly received in the fields of computer animation, advertising metrics, police profiling and the recruiting process.

With the commodification and categorisation of the deeply personal and delicate matter of emotions, it is crucial to challenge the limits of objectivity and the risks of globally adapted perception systems. By rendering the world through a lens of seemingly objective computer vision, intimate realities are at stake.

The words Elephant Juice are a common misreading of I Love You by lip-reading software, aptly capturing the narrow room for error between the deeply emotional and the absurdly poetic.

Biography

Simone C. Niquille is a designer and researcher whose work investigates how computation functions as a contemporary optical system. Working with vision technologies such as computer vision, 3D animation, computational photography, and synthetic training datasets, their practice examines how images no longer simply represent the world but actively organise perception, legibility, and reality itself. Engaging these systems from within, Niquille critiques machine learning as a tool for stabilising assumptions and instrumentalising difference, advocating instead for non-binary technological imaginaries. They teach and conduct research across design, architecture, and critical software and are currently a PhD researcher within the ARTILACS graduate school at HFBK Hamburg. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally.

Akihiko Taniguchi
New Old Homeland (2026)
25’

Synopsis

New Old Homeland is a digital work by Taniguchi that probes the shifting concept of “homeland” in a networked era. Created in Unity with the artist’s 3D-scanned avatar, the film explores the intersection of virtual space and physical belonging. It proposes a profound paradox: homeland is difficult to recognize from within, felt sharply only through distance or loss, where it feels both fabricated and emotionally urgent. Taniguchi mirrors this experience through the mechanics of game engines—where unrendered spaces and copyable objects create a structural mixture of persuasive realism and constitutive absence. Through this lens, the film establishes a new grammar for belonging in the realm of the unreal.

Biography

Akihiko Taniguchi is a media artist and an Associate Professor in the Media Arts Course, Department of Information Design at Tama Art University. His multidisciplinary practice spans media art, net art, video, and sculpture.

Mark Dorf
Homecoming (2025)
16’17’’

Synopsis

Homecoming is a 16-minute cinematic work that reimagines Homer’s The Odyssey as a contemporary meditation on home and belonging, in a time, and to a planet, where ‘home’ feels increasingly intangible. Blending live-action footage from high altitude forests and meadows of the Rocky Mountains, digital 2D and 3D animation, internet imagery, and immersive sound, the film explores how individualized algorithmic technologies and environmental uncertainty have fractured contemporary perceptions of reality and planetary home. Through a turbulent visual journey, ‘Homecoming’ reflects on memory, displacement, and the confronting the impossibility of returning to a home that no longer exists—or perhaps never did.

Biography

Mark Dorf is a New York-based artist working across photography, video, digital media, and sculpture. Engaging collaboratively with ecologists and technologists, Dorf’s work questions perceptions of what Western culture often terms “Nature”. His images and objects examine how design, image culture, technology, and science shape expectations of the “Natural” world, while engaging deeply with the digital processes behind their production. By making the marks of these often hidden digital processes visible, Dorf’s work reflects an awareness of its own production, inviting viewers to consider how digital materials shape their own lives and subsequently alter their understanding of the “Natural” world and beyond. 

Sophie Publig & Mikkel Rørbo
Digital Occultism

Presentation of the second issue of the multithread series

5 May 2026 at 6 PM
Cukrarna Gallery, Ljubljana

The launch of the second issue of multithread, Aksioma’s editorial line dedicated to experimental and speculative approaches to contemporary digital culture, features a presentation by the authors of Digital Occultism, Sophie Publig and Mikkel Rørbo, joined by members of the editorial team, Lea Sande and Ema Maznik Antić.

How can we think technoculture at a moment when the boundaries between fiction and reality, belief and knowledge are increasingly unstable? Digital Occultism approaches this question through a decisive shift: rather than treating occultism as marginal or reactionary, it considers it as one of the logics structuring contemporary digital environments.

The book develops the argument that the production of reality in technoculture is inseparable from forms of thought historically associated with the esoteric, the magical, and the occult. In this sense, occultism is a constitutive dimension of how digital systems operate.

Tracing developments from early internet cultures to contemporary platforms, the book examines how fictions generate material effects, how politics unfolds as a form of psychological warfare, and how these esoteric infrastructures participate in shaping desire, belief, and collective imaginaries.

The publication features an afterword by Zach Blas, foregrounding an additional layer of esoteric symbolism present and operating within the corporate strata of technoculture.

The presentation is followed by a moderated Q&A with members of the editorial team.

Price: 12€ 10€

Pre-order at a discount until the release date (5 May 2026)

multithread #2:
Digital Occultism
Sophie Publig & Mikkel Rørbo

Digital Occultism charts out the history of memetic circulation, situating it within a genealogy of occult logics. It operates as a constitutive force deeply embedded in technoculture and shapes how reality itself is produced. Tracing the emergence of fictions from early internet cultures to contemporary platform environments, it examines how they produce material realities, how politics operate as psychological warfare, and how desires are engineered through algorithmic feedback. In the afterword, Zach Blas takes us in and spits us out through the inverted, heretical vision of CULTUS, into the underside, rendering visible occult epistemologies operative within it.

Sophie Publig is an internet archaeologist exploring digital ecosystems. Her research and teaching move across critical posthumanism, aesthetics and digital cultures. She analyses online artefacts, from meme ecologies to networked subjectivities to internet folklore.

Mikkel Rørbo is an interdisciplinary researcher and producer of cultural detritus. His work focuses on difference, desire and abstraction, in particular how these are instantiated in computation and agency both inside and outside of capital.

Both are based at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, Vienna.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 116 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2026
ISBN 978-961-7173-68-0

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

Free admission

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

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.

Simone C Niquille
duckrabbit.tv

Exhibition
12 May–12 June 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
TUE, 12 May at 7 PM

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

duckrabbit.tv is a video installation that explores the political implications of contemporary vision technologies, questioning how computational photography, datasets, and rendered imagery often act as substitutes for what is real. The work centres on a confused and curious queer character: a digital reincarnation of the 1892 duck-rabbit optical illusion, popularized by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to illustrate the ambiguity of perception. Now revived in the age of synthetic vision, this character becomes a vessel through which the project navigates the trials and tribulations of self-discovery and CGI production.

Simone C Niquille’s playful yet critical approach exposes the computational ways of seeing that increasingly govern how reality is constructed. Visual meaning is extracted through pattern recognition, object classification, and algorithmic inference – processes in which images, generated by machines for machines, no longer refer back to physical referents but instead produce their own regimes of truth. The rendered image becomes a tool of classification rather than representation, designed to fit within the expectations of training data and automated detection systems.

As the protagonist stumbles through a “rendered reality,” where perceptual ambiguity collides with the rigid logic of machine vision, the viewer is invited to reflect on the difference between capturing and compositing ourselves and our surroundings. duckrabbit.tv offers a humorous but unsettling meditation on inhabiting an image world regulated by digital and algorithmic operations, and its social and political implications for non-conforming subjects.

THE AUTHOR

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher whose work investigates how computation functions as a contemporary optical system. Working with vision technologies such as computer vision, 3D animation, computational photography, and synthetic training datasets, their practice examines how images no longer simply represent the world but actively organise perception, legibility, and reality itself. Engaging these systems from within, Niquille critiques machine learning as a tool for stabilising assumptions and instrumentalising difference, advocating instead for non-binary technological imaginaries. They teach and conduct research across design, architecture, and critical software and are currently a PhD researcher within the ARTILACS graduate school at HFBK Hamburg. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Simone C Niquille
Balloons etc.
WED, 13 May 2026 at 3 PM
ALUO / Erjavčeva, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Simone C Niquille
WAWLA (What Are We looking At)
WED, 13 May 2026 at 5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Simone C Niquille
Balloons etc.

Artist talk
WED, 13 May 2026 at 3 PM
ALUO / Erjavčeva, Ljubljana

Part of the symposium tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

Balloons etc. is a lecture that presents a research narrative following the construction of computer-generated images. Departing from a balloon, the lecture unfolds through inflated objects, blown-up JPEG images, projected textures and expanded expectations, while questioning the synthetic image’s depiction of the world. The lecture draws from technical sources, popular culture and art history to puncture the promise of synthetic imagery to represent the world wholesale.

THE AUTHOR

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher whose work investigates how computation functions as a contemporary optical system. Working with vision technologies such as computer vision, 3D animation, computational photography, and synthetic training datasets, their practice examines how images no longer simply represent the world but actively organise perception, legibility, and reality itself. Engaging these systems from within, Niquille critiques machine learning as a tool for stabilising assumptions and instrumentalising difference, advocating instead for non-binary technological imaginaries. They teach and conduct research across design, architecture, and critical software and are currently a PhD researcher within the ARTILACS graduate school at HFBK Hamburg. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Simone C Niquille
duckrabbit.tv 2.0
12 May–12 June 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Simone C Niquille
WAWLA (What Are We looking At)
WED, 13 May 2026 at 5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Simone C Niquille
WAWLA (What Are We Looking At)

Workshop
WED, 13 May 2026 at 5 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

FREE admission. Registration required!

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

WAWLA (What Are We Looking At) is a workshop that dives into the world of computer vision, image training datasets and the invisible human labour that makes machines see. We will get familiar with the workflow of creating a computer vision model and the steps behind assembling and preparing an image training dataset while specifically focusing on image segmentation. Segmentation is crucial for computer vision as it “points out” the parts of an image that are of value to the system. At this stage of image processing, an image is visually separated into areas of information. By outlining an object of interest (a road sign, a deer, a face) or filling in a region of particular focus (the road, the tree, shadows), these marked segments ultimately inform the computer vision model’s way of perceiving the world. What is and isn’t segmented depends on various factors, from the technology’s future application to cultural context, image resolution, operation language, subjective perception, and might differ from our own way of reading an image.

During the workshop, participants will get introduced to different examples of image training datasets and the workflow of processing visual data through image segmentation tasks while being faced with the ethical, philosophical and political challenges of teaching systematic vision and deciding “what is important to see”. This workshop is deliberately non-technical. We will be working with paper and markers for accessibility and to make tangible the labour and compromises involved in creating technology that otherwise is obscured by innovation.

Duration: 3h
No prior knowledge required.

FREE admission. Registration required!

THE AUTHOR

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher whose work investigates how computation functions as a contemporary optical system. Working with vision technologies such as computer vision, 3D animation, computational photography, and synthetic training datasets, their practice examines how images no longer simply represent the world but actively organise perception, legibility, and reality itself. Engaging these systems from within, Niquille critiques machine learning as a tool for stabilising assumptions and instrumentalising difference, advocating instead for non-binary technological imaginaries. They teach and conduct research across design, architecture, and critical software and are currently a PhD researcher within the ARTILACS graduate school at HFBK Hamburg. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Simone C Niquille
Balloons etc.
WED, 13 May 2026 at 3 PM
ALUO / Erjavčeva, Ljubljana

EXHIBITION

Simone C Niquille
duckrabbit.tv 2.0
12 May–12 June 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Felicity Hammond
Latent Spaces

Exhibition
1 April–30 April 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 1 April at 8 PM

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

In November 2025, the first orbital data centre was launched, marking a bold shift: by relocating computation to space, we leave behind the ecological limits of Earth. The current terrestrial system is on the brink of collapse; natural resources are depleting and the grid will soon no longer support the power needed for the reckless race towards AGI. AI data centres in space therefore offer a potential new frontier for machine learning infrastructures, leaving the failed model behind.

In this newly commissioned installation titled Latent Space, Felicity Hammond offers a speculative glimpse into a not-too-distant future where this new approach to space-based computation has become the dominant position in the AI industry. However, the system continues to battle with the effects of model collapse – a process by which generative models are trained on data generated by previous AI models, causing data loss, degradation, and abstraction from the experience and representation of the phenomenal world. In an attempt to recalibrate the system, performers have been employed to restage original data. Data-performers absorb this image material and attempt to re-imagine a set of average images, an amalgam of the originals. On-board surveillance captures these gestures in photographic form and feeds them back into the system. This recalibration process is tested via the online image archive of Aksioma, scraped from Flickr for the purposes of this pilot test.

Meanwhile, the orbital data centres themselves inhabit their determined optimal trajectory: a path along the day/night boundary where the spacecraft remains in near-continuous solar illumination. As they bathe in this eternal sunlight – a condition engineered for efficiency, not comfort – the data-performers begin to long for the planet below.

THE AUTHOR

Felicity Hammond (Birmingham UK, 1988) works with installation and world building to explore digital materialities. Her recent practice-based research seeks to understand extraction as a process that binds the geological with the digital realm, creating evolving generative installation works that expose this relationship. Re-staging is a key method in Hammond’s work, where the re-production of digital events draws attention to their flaws. Hammond was the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks fellowship (2023) and has exhibited her work at The Photographers’ Gallery, C/O Berlin, Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal and Transmediale/HKW, among others. 

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Felicity Hammond
Variations
Tue, 31 March 2026 at 7:30 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Felicity Hammond
Model Collapse
Wed, 1 April 2026 at 4 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Felicity Hammond
Model Collapse

Workshop
Wed, 1 April 2026 at 4 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

FREE admission. Registration required!

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

In this practical workshop, participants will experiment with expanded collage making as a way to understand the circulation of images in the age of machine learning. They will explore the phenomenon of model collapse: a degenerative learning process caused when a model is trained on AI generated content. AI images reverse the indexical logic of photography and play a role in shaping the world; through this practical workshop, we will ask what happens when the image comes first.

Please note: whilst we are exploring machine learning tools, we will not be using generative AI software in this workshop.

Takeaways: 

Participants will develop an understanding of how:

1. Model collapse causes data loss, degradation, and abstraction within generative AI systems.
2. Collage and generative AI have many overlapping qualities.
3. Data labelling is a limiting and unethical practice.

Duration: 3h

Knowledge required: 
No prior knowledge required

FREE admission. Registration required!

THE AUTHOR

Felicity Hammond (Birmingham UK, 1988) works with installation and world building to explore digital materialities. Her recent practice-based research seeks to understand extraction as a process that binds the geological with the digital realm, creating evolving generative installation works that expose this relationship. Re-staging is a key method in Hammond’s work, where the re-production of digital events draws attention to their flaws. Hammond was the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks fellowship (2023) and has exhibited her work at The Photographers’ Gallery, C/O Berlin, Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal and Transmediale/HKW, among others. 

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Felicity Hammond
Variations
Tue, 31 March 2026 at 7:30 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

EXHIBITION

Felicity Hammond
Latent Space
1 April–30 April 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Felicity Hammond
Variations

Artist talk
Tue, 31 March 2026 at 7:30 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

Part of the symposiumtactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

The focus of this talk will be Variations – an artistic research project by Felicity Hammond that interrogates the meeting places of geological mining and data mining. Over the past two years, Hammond has explored the extractive systems that bind these processes together, inserting herself into the machine that drives contemporary image production. Staged across four chapters and ending in a funeral service for artificial intelligence, Variations
maps how digital material makes its way from mineral to pixel, from the subsurface to the screen.

This talk will share the details of each chapter, from the fictional organisation set up to manually classify physical materials as data, to the enactment of model collapse. Hammond will also contextualise these findings with her new commission for Aksioma Project Space, Latent Space, where the proposed afterlife of artificial intelligence lives on in outer-space.

THE AUTHOR

Felicity Hammond (Birmingham UK, 1988) works with installation and world building to explore digital materialities. Her recent practice-based research seeks to understand extraction as a process that binds the geological with the digital realm, creating evolving generative installation works that expose this relationship. Re-staging is a key method in Hammond’s work, where the re-production of digital events draws attention to their flaws. Hammond was the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks fellowship (2023) and has exhibited her work at The Photographers’ Gallery, C/O Berlin, Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal and Transmediale/HKW, among others. 

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Felicity Hammond
Latent Space
1 April–30 April 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Felicity Hammond
Model Collapse
Wed, 1 April 2026 at 4 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Martyna Marciniak
Anatomy of Non-Fact. Chapter 1: AI Hyperrealism

Exhibition
31 March–22 May 2026
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

Opening
TUE, 31 March at 21 PM

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

In AI Hyperrealism, Martyna Marciniak materializes the puffer jacket made infamously viral by the AI-generated image of the so-called Balenciaga Pope. The image was originally created by a 31-year-old man named Pablo Xavier using Midjourney, while he was tripping on shrooms, and quickly became the symbol of the AI boom of 2023. It reignited discussions about truth and misinformation in photography and journalism, and sparked controversies about digital reproduction of human likeness.

In AI Hyperrealism, the first chapter of Marciniak’s Anatomy of Non-Fact project, the artist inverts the relations between physical and virtual, between material object and image, and between experienced and perceived reality. By creating the infamous puffer jacket, the artist transforms the image into material reality and makes the collective imagination of Pope Francis’s stylish coat tangible. AI Hyperrealism also connects with the present shift in commercial fields based on economies of attention – where goods exist first solely as synthetic images, to be produced only if the AI image seduces the gaze of enough potential buyers.

Accompanying the installation is a short video featuring the Balenciaga Pope monologuing about notions of truth and questioning the reliability of images and traditional sources of authority. Reflecting on the contemporary role of photography and visual culture, the work explores the implications of a world shaped, and even entirely built, from synthetic images.

THE AUTHOR

Martyna Marciniak’s practice bridges media theory and legal imaginaries to trace how power inscribes itself through image regimes and visual infrastructures. Often revisiting historical events, her work engages in a form of pataforensics – poking at the tropes of scientific and forensic aesthetics, revealing their uncertainties, contradictions and lapses. Oscillating between sculpture, video and animation, she writes visual counter histories and smuggles in other ways of seeing. Her work has been shown by Onassis Stegi, Copenhagen Contemporary, Ars Electronica, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Warsaw Biennale, LABoral Centro de Arte, among others. She is the 2025 CERN Collide resident. Her project Anatomy of Non-Fact received the Award of Distinction Prix Ars Electronica in 2025.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Martyna Marciniak
Blobsters, Slop and Hyper-Events: Negotiating Visual Trust in a Post-Optical Era
Tue, 31 March 2026 at 5 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

Martyna Marciniak
Blobsters, Slop and Hyper-Events: Negotiating Visual Trust in a Post-Optical Era

Artist talk
Tue, 31 March 2026 at 5 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

Part of the symposium tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

In her talk, Martyna Marciniak unpacks the complex landscape of synthetic image misinformation from 2018 until now by applying strategies informed by her forensic practice and a deep fascination with glitches and errors. By tracing the various visual mechanisms of manufacturing belief and trust, informed by Catholic Church aesthetics, media history and technomyths, selected synthetic images unfold as deep repositories of technical and cultural knowledge. The presentation allows for contemplation, reconsideration and reorganisation of the visual language of trust, evidence and attention.

In the second part of the talk, the artist considers synthetic images as generators of “deep realities” and devices for conjuring hyperstitious, self-fulfilling prophecies. Countering the prevailing dichotomy of the “real vs fake” (an unwelcome gift of post-Trumpian parlance), a project-specific lexicon is employed as an attempt to identify the operational functions of synthetic images, their aesthetic nuances and finally as a practice of undoing the popularised yet harmful anthropomorphisation of the AI concepts.

THE AUTHOR

Martyna Marciniak’s practice bridges media theory and legal imaginaries to trace how power inscribes itself through image regimes and visual infrastructures. Often revisiting historical events, her work engages in a form of pataforensics – poking at the tropes of scientific and forensic aesthetics, revealing their uncertainties, contradictions and lapses. Oscillating between sculpture, video and animation, she writes visual counter histories and smuggles in other ways of seeing. Her work has been shown by Onassis Stegi, Copenhagen Contemporary, Ars Electronica, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Warsaw Biennale, LABoral Centro de Arte, among others. She is the 2025 CERN Collide resident. Her project Anatomy of Non-Fact received the Award of Distinction Prix Ars Electronica in 2025.

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EXHIBITION

Martyna Marciniak
Anatomy of Non-Fact. Chapter 1: AI Hyperrealism
31 March–22 May 2026
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

THE VOID +
We have always been brainrotted

Theory music performance
10 Februar 2026 at 7 PM
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

11 Februar 2026 at 8 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

FREE admission. Registration required!

In the transdisciplinary performative essay We have always been brainrotted, Aksioma joins forces with the collective THE VOID. The essay, interwoven with audio-visual elements that will be composed on the spot, addresses the prevailing imperative of contemporary social media cultural production, brainrot, which tends towards a form of vertical video defined primarily by unconditional algorithmic curation.

THE VOID (T.V.) is a project that questions the boundaries of audiovisual publishing and creates a platform for sharing the findings of online researchers. It achieves this by establishing a hybrid recording and broadcasting studio that uses a green screen to add live-coded visuals and multi-layered images, broadcasting the event in person and online. For this edition, the collective is expanding into THE VOID +, joined by a group of local artists and the Aksioma team.

We have always been brainrotted addresses the elusive definition of the cultural phenomenon of brainrot. The performative essay attempts to distance itself from understanding of brainrot as a genre of content or a social media trend and instead conceives of it as an imperative and true expression of algorithmic culture. Through an examination of digital holes, peripheral media, and operational images, it anchors brainrot as a reflection of the intertwining of technological, cultural, social, and economic factors.

THE VOID + “band” consists of members of the Amsterdam Institute of Network Cultures (INC) Tommaso Campagna, Jordi Viader Guerrero, and Giulia Timis, intermedia artist and VJ Neža Knez, DJ and producer Tisa Troha aka msn gf, and researcher Lea Sande.

The Band
Lea Sande: SINGER (research, text, voice)
Tisa Troha: SYNTH (research, text editor, musical performer)
Neža Knez: SCREEN (visual performer, video editor, graphic design)
Giulia Timis: CAMERA (3D visuals, camera, live image processing)
Jordi Viader Guerrero: DESKTOP (research, text editor, visual performer, video editor)
Tommaso Campagna: MODEM (director of photography, live streaming, stage design, video editor)

The Roadies
Oskar Kandare: live camera, debugger
Valter Udovičić: stage technician, sound engineer

The Managers
Janez F. Janša: fat boss with cigar
Marcela Okretič: production and tour manager
Ema Maznik Antić: stage manager

The Promoter
Neža Bukovec

Nina Davies
Synchronising with Images

Artist talk
Tue, 24 February 2026 at 6 PM
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

In this talk, Nina Davies examines how early image-making technologies, originally invented for scientific purposes, came to be adopted as tools for storytelling, and trace how these storytelling logics have seeped into courtrooms and other high-stakes environments. In this sense, images synchronise with reality so convincingly that we treat them as faithful reflections of events, yet techniques like slow motion can subtly distort what we see – implying, for example, that a person had more time to act than they actually did, a distortion that can influence judgments of guilt or innocence.

The talk also explores what it might mean for people to physically synchronise with images. From moving in slow motion to walking like an NPC to presenting oneself as an AI-generated image, she demonstrates how her work imagines a world in which the body can recalibrate – or even disrupt – our relationship to technology.

THE AUTHOR

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Previous research projects have included; the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Her work explores how popular dance trends mimic digital misrepresentations of the human body, using glitchy and repetitive movement as a choreographic vernacular that tests how bodies are read, captured, and circulated by technological systems. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been shown at venues such as Tate Britain, V&A Museum, Somerset House and the Photographers Gallery. In 2021, she co-founded Future Artefacts FM, an artist-run program that showcases artists working with speculative fiction for broadcast.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Nina Davies
Image Syncers
25 February–25 March 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Nina Davies
Generated Choreographies
Wed, 25 February 2026 at 4 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Nina Davies
Image Syncers

Exhibition
25 February–25 March 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 25 February at 8 PM

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

In Image Syncers, Nina Davies speculates on a near-future where synthetic images not only structure visual culture but begin to dictate how bodies move, behave, and express themselves. Drawing on contemporary online phenomena – particularly TikTok trends where users mimic uncanny, AI-generated dance videos – Davies imagines a world in which people internalise machine logic, choreographing themselves to match computational aesthetics and the properties of generative AI imagery.

At the center of the installation is a video narrated by two fictional podcast hosts, recounting the story of the “Plot Corps” – a shadowy collective attempting to physically transform their appearance to resemble AI-generated imagery. As the characters spiral into discussions of “image syncing,” “perception collapse,” and ontological uncertainty, the artist unpacks the recursive relationship between the self and synthetic imaging technologies. Identity becomes not just represented by images, but actively shaped and trained in relation to them.

By dramatizing the breakdown of boundaries between human and machine, Image Syncers reframes the politics of visual representation. In this world, images are not just seen – they are identities to conform to and realities to adhere to. They open spaces for communication with algorithmic forces that reside in opaque black boxes, where glitches are no longer errors but can be interpreted as languages and forms of expression. Davies’ work captures the unsettling moment in which subjects no longer stand in front of images, but live within them – and communicate with them – negotiating identity, agency, and legibility in an image world that operates autonomously from its physical index.

THE AUTHOR

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Previous research projects have included; the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Her work explores how popular dance trends mimic digital misrepresentations of the human body, using glitchy and repetitive movement as a choreographic vernacular that tests how bodies are read, captured, and circulated by technological systems. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been shown at venues such as Tate Britain, V&A Museum, Somerset House and the Photographers Gallery. In 2021, she co-founded Future Artefacts FM, an artist-run program that showcases artists working with speculative fiction for broadcast.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Nina Davies
Synchronising with Images
Tue, 24 February 2026 at 6 PM
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Nina Davies
Generated Choreographies
Wed, 25 February 2026 at 4 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Nina Davies
Generated Choreographies

Workshop
Wed, 25 February 2026 at 4 PM
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Part of tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

Generated Choreographies is a performance workshop by Nina Davies, which explores movement in relation to generated videos, deep fakes, and AI interrupted memes. Through a series of choreographic exercises, the workshop will support participants to explore how generated footage can be simulated by the body rather than computational devices.

To begin the workshop, Davies will introduce methods she has used to mimic digital processes within the body as well as present some AI videos for participants to scan through and find re-creatable choreographies from. Following this, she will demonstrate and teach the group a short repertoire of movements drawn from popular generated videos found on TikTok and other shortform video platforms.

Participants will then break out into smaller groups to explore creating their own choreographic phrases inspired by generated videos of their choosing. To conclude the workshop, participants will present what they have made and collectively discuss where these sets of movements could be used in everyday life to alter our perceptions of events.

Takeaways:

– An understanding of how new image technologies affect the way we might move
– Learn methods of evading surveillance technology using dance
– Authorship of fakeness

Duration: 3h

Materials and knowledge required:

– Please bring your phone for recording session
– Phone charger

THE AUTHOR

Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Previous research projects have included; the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Her work explores how popular dance trends mimic digital misrepresentations of the human body, using glitchy and repetitive movement as a choreographic vernacular that tests how bodies are read, captured, and circulated by technological systems. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Her work has recently been shown at venues such as Tate Britain, V&A Museum, Somerset House and the Photographers Gallery. In 2021, she co-founded Future Artefacts FM, an artist-run program that showcases artists working with speculative fiction for broadcast.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Nina Davies
Synchronising with Images
Tue, 24 February 2026 at 6 PM
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

In this talk, Nina Davies examines how early image-making technologies, originally invented for scientific purposes, came to be adopted as tools for storytelling, and trace how these storytelling logics have seeped into courtrooms and other high-stakes environments. In this sense, images synchronise with reality so convincingly that we treat them as faithful reflections of events, yet techniques like slow motion can subtly distort what we see – implying, for example, that a person had more time to act than they actually did, a distortion that can influence judgments of guilt or innocence.

The talk also explores what it might mean for people to physically synchronise with images. From moving in slow motion to walking like an NPC to presenting oneself as an AI-generated image, she demonstrates how her work imagines a world in which the body can recalibrate – or even disrupt – our relationship to technology.

EXHIBITION

Nina Davies
Image Syncers
25 February–25 March 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Sara Bezovšek, Beti Frim, Neo Nor
Chronically Online

Curated by
Lara Mejač, Ugo Pecoraio, Heiko Schmid

Exhibition
2 February–28 February 2026
KUNSTSURFER

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To use the add-on, you’ll need to download and install it in your browser. The process is very simple, quick and 100% secure!

DOWNLOAD for Firefox
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In today’s hyper-commercialized online environment, artists Sara Bezovšek, Beti Frim, and Neo Nor hijack digital advertisements to disrupt our scrolling habits. Their work invites us into their own digital worlds, where nostalgia for the early web intertwines with a critical examination of contemporary internet culture. In the group exhibition Chronically Online, their pieces linger between evoking the spirit of the first online communities and imagining what virtual spaces might yet become.

In their own distinct way, each artist of the exhibition explores how users navigate and inhabit online spaces. This includes analyzing meme logic and cultural absorption within the current cluttered digital environment, deliberately revisiting the DIY aesthetics of early web graphics, or creating virtual retreats from the constant demands of online performativity. 

Neo Nor constructs snippets into a nightmarish world dense with niche gaming references and marginal characters surviving at the edge of systemic collapse. His post-digital dystopia reflects on the internet’s role as both an escape and a site of identity formation, while at the same time alluding to the unpolished, ‘ugly’ aesthetics of the early web. The revival of this visual language, which contrasts sharply with today’s minimalist, commercial design, serves as a tool of playful resistance. 

Sara Bezovšek draws inspiration from the 2010s phenomenon of online personality quizzes, inviting users to “find out what their online personality is.” By answering a series of questions, the participants move through various belief systems, political opinions, and ideological paths. Beneath its engaging surface, which reflects the logic of online consumption, the project critically examines how the algorithmically informed worldview is constructed and commodified within today’s saturated media landscape. 

The overwhelming feelings of the average internet user are also captured in Beti Frim’s whimsical digital sanctuaries, which serve as a response to the relentless commercialization and performance pressure of contemporary online life. Her work offers a utopian retreat, a quiet refuge built within a dreamy, girlish aesthetic full of past online references and memes. Another layer of the project, conceived as a step-by-step online manual for Means of escapism, subverts the productivity-driven logic of the internet and invites exhausted users to slowly disconnect.

Beneath the exhibition’s critical engagement with today’s internet culture runs an undercurrent of nostalgia for a time when the web felt more manageable, slower, less monetised, and more community-oriented. But rather than longing for the simpler times, the Chronically Online exhibition reclaims agency within ad spaces and uses the attention economy’s own tools to question whether we could imagine the internet in another way.

In an era where meaning dissolves with every scroll, where memory lasts only as long as a story’s fleeting lifespan, and where ads, posts, and notifications wage a relentless battle for our attention, these artists ask: Can we redesign the structures of the internet? Through their work, they not only question the status quo but also imagine alternative ways of existing online.

THE VOID +
We Have Always Been Brainrotted

Theory music performance
10 Februar 2026 at 7 PM
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

11 Februar 2026 at 8 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

In the transdisciplinary performative essay We have always been brainrotted, Aksioma and THE VOID joined forces for two public presentations unfolding both on site and online. Interwoven with audio-visual elements composed live on the spot, the essay addressed the prevailing imperative of contemporary social media cultural production, brainrot, which tends toward a form of vertical video defined primarily by unconditional algorithmic curation.

We have always been brainrotted engages with the elusive definition of brainrot as a cultural phenomenon. The performative essay moves away from understanding brainrot as a genre of content or a passing social media trend, and instead approaches it as an imperative and a true expression of algorithmic culture. Through an examination of digital holes, peripheral media, and operational images, it frames brainrot as a reflection of the intertwining of technological, cultural, social, and economic factors.

Over the course of two live events the essay takes shape as a live collective composition of text, sound, and image. The public presentations create a shared setting in which performative narration and live-produced audio-visual material can be experienced simultaneously by audiences in the venues and through the livestreams on the InBetween platform.

Event report by the Institute of Network Cultures

LIVE AT AKSIOMA

10 Februar 2026
LIVE STREAMING ARCHIVE

LIVE AT KINO ŠIŠKA

11 Februar 2026
LIVE STREAMING ARCHIVE