M. Beatrice Fazi
Cave Machines:
On the Platonic Representation Hypothesis

Lecture
13 October 2026 at 6 PM
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

Q&A moderated by Marko Bauer

With a lecture by M. Beatrice Fazi at the Moderna galerija, Aksioma and the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures are launching a series of new publications and related discursive events that will take place at various venues in Ljubljana and Vienna over the coming months.

The Italian philosopher – known for her work in the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and media philosophy – will give a preview of her new essay entitled “Cave Machines: On the Platonic Representation Hypothesis”, commissioned by the two aforementioned institutions and co-published by Aksioma and the University of Applied Arts Vienna as part of the PostScriptUM series of short essays.

Printed copies will be available for the first time during the event.

In 2024, four MIT researchers named a hypothesis after Plato’s cave: neural networks, trained on different data and tasks, converge on one representation of reality. In Cave Machines, M. Beatrice Fazi takes the conjecture at its word, following it back to Plato, where it comes apart. The models never turn from the wall; the reality behind their agreement falls away. What remains is stranger than realism: representation as construction, structure built, not found, and a cave that is all there is.

The event will also feature a pop-up bookstore offering the latest publications from Aksioma as well as releases from local publishing initiatives such as ETC. magazine, Maska, Kamizdat, Šum and Založba Sophia’s book series Izhodi.

Beatrice Fazi’s lecture in Ljubljana is a pre-event to
The Theory Cinematic Universe

the symposium organised by Aksioma and the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, which will take place at Kino Šiška on 7 December 2026.

More soon.

Price: 14€

The consumption of marginal media practices has a long history, which has only now, thanks to the power of algorithmic curation, found full expression in the phenomenon of brainrot. Through an analysis of peripheral media, the structuring of content as a digital hole, and the operationalisation of short-form content within the computational economy, this essay illustrates how brainrot can be read as an untethered expression of algorithmic culture.

THE VOID+ is an international group of researchers and artists (Lea Sande, Tommaso Campagna, Jordi Viader Guerrero, Giulia Timis, Tisa Troha, Neža Knez and Oskar Kandare) who write, perform, and livestream theoretical video essays as a form of expanded publishing. The initiative is coordinated by Aksioma – Institute of Contemporary Art and the Institute of Network Cultures.

EN | 120 x 120 mm | 56 pp | COLOUR | hard cover | 2026
ISBN 978-961-7173-71-0

Price: 7€

PostScript^UM #56

M. Beatrice Fazi
Cave Machines:
On the Platonic Representation Hypothesis

In 2024, four MIT researchers named a hypothesis after Plato’s cave: neural networks, trained on different data and tasks, converge on one representation of reality. In Cave Machines, M. Beatrice Fazi takes the conjecture at its word, following it back to Plato, where it comes apart. The models never turn from the wall; the reality behind their agreement falls away. What remains is stranger than realism: representation as construction, structure built, not found, and a cave that is all there is.

M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working on the philosophies of computation, technology and media. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics and on the automation of thought. She is Associate Professor at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom), author of Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics (2018) and co-author of Digital Theory (2025).

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 36 pp | soft cover | 2026
ISBN 978-961-7173-70-3 (Printed)

Lana Požlep
Opera for 14 Butterflies

Exhibition
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
9 September–30 September 2026

Opera for 14 Butterflies (2025–2026) takes the disappearance of fourteen populations of four butterfly species from the Ljubljana Marshes as its point of departure, while also touching on the effects of tourism-driven gentrification on the people who live in the city. At the centre of the work is bureaucracy: its procedures, categories and blind spots, and the question of what happens when forms of life enter an institutional system that has no place for them. As part of the project, the artist repeatedly submitted forms for the deregistration of temporary residence to a local administrative office, entering the names of vanished butterfly species where a person’s name would normally appear. The gesture produced a bureaucratic contradiction: the forms could be completed, yet the subjects they referred to did not exist within the official register. These documents later became the basis for the opera’s musical score. Its libretto weaves together anonymous personal testimonies and online conversations about displacement, changing neighbourhoods and the transformation of residential areas. The work is presented as a spatial installation in which the gallery is transformed into something resembling a forgotten administrative office. Office furniture becomes both scenography and sound source, with Opera for 14 Butterflies resonating through the space itself. The installation invites the viewer into a sensory encounter with bureaucracy, memory and disappearance, drawing attention to the quiet loss of lives and habitats that form part of our shared environment.

The Network Embodied
Digital art projects, performance and book launch

Friday, 9 October 2026 at 20:00
Umetnostna galerija Maribor, Stebriščna dvorana
Strossmayerjeva ulica 6, Maribor

Part of MFRU 2026 – International Festival of Computer Arts

🕐 20:00
Foreign Bodies
Presentation of multithread #4
by Lea Sande & Tisa Troha

🕐 20:30
Logging Off. Reclaiming Space in the Endless Feed
Artist presentations
by Dorijan Šiško, Beti Frim, Vid Koprivšek
Moderated by Lara Mejač

🕐 21:15
We Have Always Been Brainrotted
Lecture-performance
by Lea Sande

The Aksioma event The Network Embodied presents and articulates various contributions by local artists and writers on the theme of the contemporary web. The event consists of a presentation of the multithread series publication, a panel featuring local artists whose work addresses the internet, and a performative lecture We Have Always Been Brainrotted. The event is structured through the analytical lens of internet theory, that is, a theory that has emerged through online communities and infrastructures and takes into account the principles and rules of the internet when addressing reality. All three works explore forms of embodiment, whether in architectural space, in online communities, or in the role of the user and consumer of content, while, each in its own way, questioning the role of materiality in contemporary technologies.

The event will also feature a pop-up bookstore offering the latest publications from Aksioma as well as releases from local publishing initiatives such as Šum, ETC., Maska, Kamizdat and Založba Sophia’s book series Izhodi.

For the first time, the new, expanded book edition of the performative essay We Have Always Been Brainrotted by the collective the void+ will be available.

Programme details

🕐 20:00
Foreign Bodies
Presentation of multithread #4
Lea Sande & Tisa Troha

The presentation of the fourth issue of the editorial series multithread will take the form of a conversation between the author, Tisa Troha, and co-editor Lea Sande. The book addresses the role of architecture as a culture’s defense mechanism against technology. Through the lens of theory-fiction, the work explores various aspects of contemporary technology, its historicization, and its integration into the architectural canon. Both the abstract theoretical and the material architectural dimensions of the work are strongly informed by the legacy of early internet and Twitter theory.

🕐 20:30
Logging Off. Reclaiming Space in the Endless Feed
Artist presentations
Dorijan Šiško, Beti Frim, Vid Koprivšek
Moderated by Lara Mejač

Visual artists Beti Frim, Vid Koprivšek, and Dorijan Šiško come together for a critical conversation on internet culture and its influence on our communities, environment, bodies, and zeitgeist. Through the presentation of their selected projects and discussion, they will address the relationship between physical experiences and the digital realm, the internet as a repository of hope and ruin, and the user’s role as both subject and object of digital systems. They will draw upon the themes of escapism, digital archiving, online engagement, and the possibility of ecocentric alternatives to algorithmic control. From utopian digital sanctuaries through abandoned virtual ruins to anxiety-ridden algorithmic labyrinths present in their works, they will ask: How do we reclaim online and physical spaces from commercialisation and control?

🕐 21:15
We Have Always Been Brainrotted
Lecture-performance
Lea Sande

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. This time, the work will be presented for the first time in the adapted form of a video essay.

Matej Mihevc
Drift Index

Curated by
Maja Burja

Exhibition
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
7 October–13 November 2026

Opening: 7 October, 20:00–22:00

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

“It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”¹

Cardboard-sealed windows provisionally separate the drifter’s space from the sweltering atmosphere of a self-digesting grey zone. Shifting air masses carry plastiglomerated detritus inside, an omnipresent metabolic dust that gathers in the corners of the studio. Every so often, the winds bring in an interesting remnant: an abandoned fragment of latent desire, which the drifter examines under a magnifying glass during network outages.

When the connection is restored, the dormant surfaces of the screens are flooded by a luminous stream of content, directing the gaze along the actualised vectors of autonomous cultural production. A matter of sampling, engineering and market co-optation – at once everyone’s and no one’s.

Successful immersion in the generative mass requires the drifter to be struck by a detail that triggers an obsessive search for something indefinable. This is followed by rapid intuitive validation on the local server and combing through the printouts of related coordinates that have been captured on thermal rolls throughout the day. Magnification, sharpening, solarisation… Once the inkling of a drift has been consolidated, it is time to post to Drift Index.

The Drift Index network formed on the vestiges of subcultures and against the backdrop of an omnipresent and flattened visuality. It connects self-proclaimed drifters who use the network interface to conduct amateur investigations into visual codes and media artefacts in the interspaces of a self-contained system. Drifters can be compared to coolhunters, who at the turn of the millennium searched the streets for early signs of future trends – sneakers, baggy jeans, gaming consoles and the like. Mass marketing would then equip these with an image, a story and the aura of a world of their own, translating them into market objects and identities.

With the dematerialisation and platformisation of markets, the dominance of automated marketing loops, and the capacity for the endless generation of personalised content, cultural production has become an autonomous creator of infinite consumer subjectivities. Images no longer function merely as carriers of meaning, but as complex feedback systems² and affective attractors³ within a collective hallucinatory exchange.

In an environment of post-synthetic and ubiquitous production, the drifter spends his time in unproductively attentive observation – mapping overlooked artefacts, channels and connections, and aimlessly exploring the field of possibilities within the currents of images…

¹ Gibson, W. (2003). Pattern Recognition. Viking, p. 48.
² Cf. O’Murchú, N. (2026). When images become systems: on visuality, affect and platform power. Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, p. 4: “[…] visuality becomes a form of administration through which social, emotional and computational life is constructed and managed by atmospheric persuasion, algorithmic sorting, affective conditioning and aesthetic manipulation.”
³ See: Mihevc, M. “Avtonomija kontenta.” Ekran, July/August 2026.

Rebecca Edwards
Becoming Image [podcast]

Podcast season
10 September–5 November 2026
here

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

On the occasion of the 17th edition of tactics&practice Becoming Image, which explores how software systems shape human action, participation, and agency, London-based curator and producer Rebecca Edwards curated and hosted this series of podcasts to expand on the topic.

This podcast explores how AI is transforming the conditions through which we perceive, interpret and inhabit the world. Across five conversations with artists, curators, writers and researchers, the series examines the ways in which machine vision, algorithmic culture, and synthetic media play into the infrastructures that mediate attention, identity and political reality.

Through discussions on AI training data and image datasets, as well as virality, interfaces, games and generative “slop”, each episode asks how images have shifted away from the representational and have found themselves as active agents that shape behaviour, desire and collective memory. Bringing together contemporary art, media theory and critical technology studies, we ask what happens when images lose their authority, become ambient and computational, and increasingly determine how we know ourselves and each other.

From the aesthetics of ‘brainrot’ and digital doppelgängers to glitches, gaming logic and dark patterns, over five episodes we’ll explore practices that operate both within and against software systems to imagine alternative ways of seeing, playing and living alongside images. We’ll be doing this with artists and theorists Dmstfctn, Dian Joy, Milia Xin Bi, Ben Grosser and Ruby Justice Thelot, with special guest Nina Davies.

RELEASE DATES:

10 Sep | Who’s Still Here?
w/ dmstfctn

24 Sep | Brainrot as Theory
w/ Dian Joy

08 Oct | Ready Player None
w/ Milia Xin Bi

22 Oct | Darker Patterns
w/ Ben Grosser

05 Nov | The Image That’s Tired
w/ Ruby J. Thelot

Presentation of the multithread editorial series
Tue, 2 September 2026 at 11 AM
Knjigarna kavarna Maks, Delpinova ulica 10, Nova Gorica

Part of The City of Books 2026 literary festival

multithread is an editorial series by the publishing house Aksioma, dedicated to new and as yet unestablished authors who, through theoretical, essayistic and investigative writing, explore questions of contemporary culture, technology and society. At the event, co-editor Lea Sande will present all four issues of the series published to date; from the first two publications already released to the two forthcoming issues, due to be published towards the end of this year. She will pay particular attention to the second issue, entitled Digital Occultism, and the fourth issue, whose author, Tisa Troha, will join her for a discussion.

Price: 18€

A monstrous era of industrialisation is unfolding around and through us. It is beyond human comprehension, hyper-granular but opaque, ubiquitous and always somewhere else. It is multi-scalar, as its processes and bodies are capable of mobilising and intersecting multiple layers of human and non-human lives, from the nano to the planetary scale, from the molecular to the geopolitical, fostering novel interconnections and frictions, when not overt conflicts.

Emerging from an extensive process of extraction and transformation of planetary resources and intelligences, such an evolving landscape embodies both a material force and a powerful cultural engine. Networks of global logistics, real-time management, smart agents and automated feedback loops not only redefine production, supply chains, or the design of infrastructures, but also human intelligence and subjectivity, as well as a sense of agency and the functioning of democracy at scale.

All of a sudden, a strange similarity emerges with the old mining industry, a production machine lying beneath the earth’s surface perpetually cloaked in obscurity, whose only marks manifested either as its inconspicuous overground facilities or as the illnesses on workers’ skin and lungs. The current scenario poses a similar challenge, but at a rampant speed and intensity.

What is the industry, when industrialization runs through data streams and convoluted decision-making processes? Where to look when there is apparently nothing to look at? When machines and sensors do the job of seeing and understanding instead of you? How can you orient yourself when you only get blurred shadows of what industrialisation is really setting in motion? How do you reclaim agency and redefine justice?

In this terrain crumbling beneath our feet, we are requested to imagine the unimaginable. 

EN | 150 x 230 mm | 264 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2026
ISBN 978-961-7173-65-9

Published on the occasion of
The 5th Industrial Art Biennial
The Vast Automaton
Labin, Raša, Pula, Vodnjan
24 October – 30 November 2025

Curated by Bani Brusadin, Giulia Colletti

Featuring artists:
Heba Y. Amin | Andrej Beštak, Anja Leko | Živa Božičnik Rebec | Maks Bricelj, Ema Maznik Antić | Alice Bucknell | Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler | Sophie Cundale | Aleksandra Domanović | Sandro Đukić | Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich | 업채 eobchae | Daniel Felstead, Jenn Leung | 김아영 Ayoung KIM | Laibach Kunst | Lawrence Lek | 刘窗 Chuang LIU | Abu Bakarr Mansaray | !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić | 오세린 Serin OH | Gerard Ortín Castellví | 박민하 Minha PARK | Rich Pell | Tanit Plana | Cemile Sahin | Nestor Siré | Suzanne Treister | Marina Xenofontos | Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič

Related event: The Vast Automaton

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan
Uncensored Lilac

Screening
5 August–4 September 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 5 August at 8 PM

Uncensored Lilac is a film by Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan that tells a story about revenge and desire. The 30-minute film that follows a group of goddesses and their companions. Their land and ways of communication with each other have been destroyed by climate collapse, and as the temperature rises, strange forms of dissonant and dissident behaviour emerge between them. Set in a dreamlike hallucinatory landscape, the film features a series of monologues given by these mega-femme entities who have everything and nothing to say. In the cultivation of an economy where hotness equals power, this kind of global warming is no surprise – rising tempers and rising temperatures. Increasingly isolated from each other, they hold on tight to their apolitical, apathetic, consumer-driven dreams. 

This work is deeply rooted in the default architectures of CGI software and their overwhelming whiteness. The pre-set bodies that populate digital space, smooth, symmetrical, racially unmarked yet unmistakably coded, become the base material from which these goddesses emerge. Inheriting the biases of these programs, the figures occupy a landscape already colonised by aesthetic standardisation. Their beauty is not neutral; it is templated. This default whiteness mirrors the film’s climate of invasion and estrangement, a world where even fantasy is pre-formatted, where desire is engineered through consumer software, and where power circulates through the metrics of hotness. The goddesses’ simmering rage, their isolation, and their readiness to destroy one another are entangled with this digital inheritance. They are born from systems that flatten difference while promising infinite customization. As temperatures rise, so too does the pressure of this inherited normativity, until the very defaults begin to fracture, morph, and revolt.

THE AUTHORS

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is a visual artist working across film, animation, sculpture, and installation. His practice explores digital and material forms, shifting identities, and the circulation of emotion in contemporary culture. Notable solo exhibitions include THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT! (FACT, Liverpool, 2025), Uncensored Lilac (transmediale, Berlin, 2024) and ITS DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS (Douglas Hyde Gallery, 2022). Al-Sabah has shown internationally at venues like the Barbican Centre, Jue De Paume, and LIAF Biennale. He has received prestigious awards including the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction (2023) and The Golden Fleece Award (2021). 

Jennifer mehigan’s prints and paintings fuse diverse media and sources, including 3D scans of her garden, images of plants growing on the graves of strange Irish women, the archive of the Victorian portrait photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden, four-dimensional drawings by the Cork-born mathematician Alicia Boole, and an encrypted Renaissance codex known as the Voynich manuscript. Using paint, inkjet, graphics cards, neural networks, pearl powder and gel, her works blend new and old methods of making and processing the world – a relationship the artist views as a ‘strained mother-daughter bond’. Mehigan’s wider practice also incorporates CGI, sculpture, perfumery, writing, parties, artificial intelligence and horticulture, deploying sensory experience to explore queerness and femininity. 

[+] RELATED PUBLICATION

Noura Tafeche
A Stratigraphy of Vision

Lecture-performance
17 June 2026 at 7 PM
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

In a world saturated with conflicting visual stimuli and characterized by an ever-shrinking attention span, visual artist and researcher Noura Tafeche invites us to reflect on which images truly deserve our attention. She does so by developing a discourse around a single 3D architectural rendering taken from the extensive visual output of NEOM, the smart city and special economic zone—not yet built in the province of Tabuk—which constitutes the central element of Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” and its post-oil diversification program.

In the lecture-performance A Stratigraphy of Vision, premiered at the Aksioma Project Space, Tafeche guides us through the stratigraphy of the chosen image, revealing layer by layer what the image seeks to conceal. Beneath its seductive, meticulously produced architectural splendor—often structurally implausible—lies a carefully engineered opacity that disciplines perception and prepares acceptance rather than describing reality.

Ayoung Kim
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere

Screening
17–30 June 2026
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 17 June at 8 PM

“As usual, the Han River is soaked in antidepressants,
antihistamines, antibiotics and anesthetics!!!
It’s 7pm, evening peak time is back!
We’ll take you to the most elegant routes in Seoul!”
“Dancemaster always likes to keep the action to a minimum.
For Dancemaster, optimization is synonymous with elegance.
No matter what path an object travels,
nature always strives to minimize action…
You know that, don’t you?
But this is no longer about nature…”

In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), Korean artist Ayoung Kim presents a speculative vision of Seoul as an endlessly regenerating labyrinth, where urban space, labour, technology and desire become entangled within a continuously unfolding system. At its centre is Ernst Mo – an anagram of “Monster” – a female delivery rider employed by Delivery Dancer, a fictional platform whose workers are governed by Dancemaster, an omnipresent algorithm that orchestrates every movement, route and task.

Set against the luminous backdrop of a nocturnal metropolis, the work draws on the realities of platform labour and the rapid expansion of the gig economy in South Korea, particularly during and after the pandemic. Yet its scope extends far beyond social commentary. The project explores questions of topology, possible worlds, algorithmic control, hypervigilance and the relentless drive towards optimisation of body, time and space. Seoul emerges as a space suspended between techno-orientalism and Asian futurism, at once familiar and speculative.

Guided by Dancemaster’s elegantly rendered navigation lines, the protagonist traverses an infinite sequence of delivery routes. Every destination generates new pathways, creating a maze-like structure that continuously expands and folds back upon itself.

As Ernst Mo moves through the city, she encounters fissures where parallel realities begin to overlap. Through these ruptures appears En Storm – another anagram of “Monster” – a counterpart from an alternative yet seemingly identical world. Their relationship unfolds through moments of confrontation, empathy and affection, revealing forms of connection that challenge the boundaries of space, time and identity. Drawing on possible-world theory, the work imagines reality as one among innumerable worlds, where multiple versions of the self may coexist and where different ways of being and relating remain perpetually unresolved.

THE AUTHOR

Ayoung Kim weaves reality anew through a tapestry of hybrid narratives, integrating geopolitics, mythology, technology, technoprecarity, and speculative temporalities into her work. Kim often depicts nonconformists or technoprecarious entities whose resistance or misalignment leaves behind strange and singular traces as they deviate from prescribed trajectories. Kim’s synthesized narratives result in far-reaching speculation, establishing connections between biopolitics and border controls, the memories of stones and virtual memories, and ancestral origins and imminent futures across various media. Her practice incorporates discourses on optical and post-optical media, performativity, game simulation, and the narrativity of fiction. Her interest in synthesis, hybridization, and the coexistence of heterogeneous time led to an interest in all kinds of intersections, transfers, transpositions, and interchanges of time, space, structure, and syntax.

[+] RELATED PUBLICATION

Price: 7€

PostScript^UM #55

Nora O’ Murchú
When Images Become Systems:
On Visuality, Affect and Platform Power

In our image-saturated present, we have become disconcertingly familiar with a new kind of image – affective, performative, computational – one that reorganises perception while destabilising meaning in real time. Through works by Simone C Niquille, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, Jennifer Mehigan, and Ayoung Kim, O’Murchú traces how artists make the conditions of the image visible – exposing a regime of visibility in which the synthetic governs the real.

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 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 exploring contemporary image culture and the politics of perception.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 44 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2026
ISBN 978-961-7173-69-7 (Printed)

Sofi Xian
An Archaeology of a Promised Future: How Frutiger Aero Was Uncovered

Talk
20 May 2026 at 6.30 PM
ALUO / Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Q&A moderated by Lea Sande & Ema Maznik Antić

Pre-event to the release of the 3rd issue of multithread

Perhaps you have heard of Frutiger Aero, the aesthetic floating around on TikTok and in people’s retro-tech filled bedrooms, which Valentina Tanni calls the successor to ‘Vaporwave’. But how does one even ‘discover’ an aesthetic? In a talk for Aksioma, Sofi Xian, a co-founder of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, charts her meandering journey through eclectic and unpredictable sources including open-source software theming, hipster semiotics, Wes Anderson parodies, Japanese and Korean music of the 90s and 00s, and the Weird Facebook subculture to explain how she came to describe this ‘lost future’. The talk traces how these seemingly disconnected observations, spanning over a decade, gradually coalesce into a methodology for identifying and naming ‘consumer aesthetics’—and what that methodology reveals about the way our collective experience is shaped by disposable and ambient expressions.

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.

---

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.