Sophie Publig, Charlotte Reuß
Choose Your Avatar – Girlblogging as posthumanist practice

Workshop
13 May 2025, 5.00–7.00 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?

In this workshop, participants will explore the fluid identity of the Girl Online through the lens of autotheory, using digital tools inspired by girlblogging practices such as journaling, speculative storytelling, fan fiction, browser tab histories, and moodboard archaeology. By reimagining life paths as narratives shaped by mood, energy, and traits—similar to creating a game character in The Sims—you’ll be able to consider how we construct and perform our identities online and irl. Projecting the contradictions embodied by the Girl Online onto personal avatar creation offers the possibility to perform a critique of gender stereotypes in connection to platform capitalism, while acknowledging the Girl Online’s identity as one rooted in late capitalism. Playing with the cultural artifacts of girlblogging allows participants to unearth the entanglements between their digital and meatspace selves and experiment with renarrating their existence through the perspective of the Girl Online. 

Takeaways:
A deeper understanding of the construction of fluid identities in the context of digital cultures, late stage capitalism, and posthumanism.

Practical tools for storytelling and autotheory to craft new narratives.

Media-specific techniques to engage with and reinterpret online artifacts, like browser tab histories and Tumblr archaeology.

Updated insights into the interweaving between personal identity and digital cultures through the lens of the Girl Online.

Duration: 2h

Materials and knowledge required:
No prior knowledge is required—just an open mind and willingness to explore!
Participants should bring a laptop or tablet for online exploration and writing.
A notebook or journal is recommended for offline sketching of ideas and reflections.

Free of charge. Registration required!

THE AUTHORS

Sophie Publig is a Senior Scientist and internet archaeologist exploring digital ecosystems. Based at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and affiliated with the Critical Media Lab in Basel, she researches and teaches on memes, critical posthumanism and digital occultism, with a focus on unearthing the symbiotic relationships between technology, culture and the environment. Her 2023 dissertation on the history of internet memes will be published by punctum books in the coming year. In collaboration with Charlotte Reuß, Sophie has been working on the research project @weareallgirlsonline since 2024.

Charlotte Reuß‘s research explores digital cultures, copyright, and the commodification and accessibility of culture. Since 2020, she has been affiliated with the Department of Art History, the Art Education Department, and the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she is pursuing her doctoral research on access to culture in the context of digitality. Alongside Sophie Publig, she is also a collaborator on the research project @weareallgirlsonline. Charlotte holds degrees in Art History from the University of Vienna and in European Art History and Philosophy from Ruperto Carola University of Heidelberg.

[+] RELATED ACTIIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Joanna Bacas, Socrates Stamatatos
EVA (Evil Vibrant Astute) 2.0
14 May–15 June 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Joanna Bacas, Socrates Stamatatos
EVA (Evil Vibrant Astute) 2.0

Exhibition
14 May–15 June 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 14 May at 7 PM

Part of Tactics&Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

The biblical story of “the Fall” mirrors the lore of Pandora’s Box. In Greek mythology, Pandora, the first woman, was entrusted with a box she was forbidden to open. However, her curiosity compelled her to do so, unleashing all the world’s evils—sorrow, disease, and death—into existence. Only Hope remained inside, offering some comfort to humanity amid the suffering.

A common experience among femme and queer subjects in our society is a cycle of brutal disenchantment of reality and the journey—often involving multiple identity crises—to the reenchantment of life. For these subjects, to acquire knowledge means deconstructing centuries of oppressive systems, only to end up with a dark void. This void, often portrayed as a dark trance, is captured in many memes like those at #girlcore, where knowledge and the act of knowing is usually akin to an act of violence, a loss of innocence.

In their multimedia exhibition EVA (Evil Vibrant Astute) 2.0, Joanna Bacas and Socrates Stamatatos invite you to a playdate. The large-scale installation is both a city–similar to the playsets of our childhood–and something that resembles the inner structure of a machine–like a motherboard. Within this peculiar city, visitors can interact with a network built specifically for the project. Using it, they can exchange theory and media on topics like girlhood, feminism, re-enchantment and technology, to name just a few.

The artists invite visitors to crouch down and play as they did when they were children. Recalling memories of endless games and countless imaginary worlds, they can understand how fantasy and magic played an integral part in their early enchantment with life and the world.

EVA 2.0 is the closing exhibition of tactics&practice #16. Aligning with its themes, it aims at expanding on the idea of action in order to counteract oppressive systems. How can re-enchantment foster environments for collective action? How can fantasy and escapism act as tools for synergy and for visualizing more equitable and bright futures?

THE AUTHORS

Joanna Bacas is a transdisciplinary artist based in Berlin. She holds a diploma in Fine Arts/Sculpture from Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin. Her practice spans ceramics, jewelry, poetry, and illustration, exploring identity, agency, sensuality, and resistance through a queer feminist lens. Beyond critiquing oppressive systems, her work envisions utopian alternatives and reclaims the body as a site of healing and empowerment. She has exhibited internationally, including at HGW STD, Milan Jewelry Week, Budapest Jewelry Week, and Schwules Museum Berlin, and recently contributed to a symposium at Die Angewandte on digital constructions of girlhood. Her makeup design work has appeared in Vogue, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, and productions at the National Theater of Greece and Berlin Fashion Week.

Socrates Stamatatos is an independent curator and transdisciplinary artist based in Athens. Their curatorial, artistic and theoretical pursuits engage deeply with the queer experience and the philosophy of caring, focusing on the empowerment of marginalized communities through the use of digital technologies for connectivity and community building. They hold a BA in Theory and History of Arts. They have shown their work and contributions of various disciplines independently and in collaboration with a variety of art and cultural institutions, including Institute of Network Cultures, panke.gallery, HGW Std., Onassis ONX/AiR, die Angewandte, and State of Concept. They are also a Culture Moves Europe fellow.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Sophie Publig, Charlotte Reuß
Becoming-Girl: On Posthuman Subjectivities and Algorithmic Epistemologies
Tue, 13 May 2025 at 4 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

Sophie Publig, Charlotte Reuß
Choose Your Avatar – Girlblogging as posthumanist practice
Tue, 13 May 2025 at 5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

FREE admission. Registration required!

The pre-order campaign is open. Shipments will begin on 8 May.

Price: 10€
Language: English

Online is not a place we go: it is a place we cannot leave. In an increasingly hegemonic internet ecosystem, where do we find temporary spaces for refuge? The answer to this growing need to escape the Clearnet might be Dark Forests. These sheltered digital spaces structurally and discursively foster community formation, allow for experimentations in self-presentation, and propose alternative imaginaries to the mainstream internet of platforms. Casting long shadows over a handful of fertile corners of the web, Dark Forests make themselves visible only to some. The Dark Forest system seems silent or incomprehensible from afar. But once you’re in, there is nothing but noise.

Marta Ceccarelli is a writer, blogger and independent researcher. blogreform is the Substack where her interests manifest through cultural analysis, experimental autofiction and more.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 88 pp | COLOUR | soft cover | 2025
ISBN 978-961-7173-60-4

2girls1comp
I AM IN YOUR GAME – Reappropriating Game Spaces Through Texture Replacement

Workshop
2 April 2025, 4.30–7.00 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?

Textures in video games are what creates the visual identity of virtual environments, providing more than mere decoration for 3D models. They represent and shape the spaces players inhabit, embedding social and political meanings within the game.

In this workshop, participants will learn how to modify and personalize the game world of Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar, 2013) by altering its visual textures. We will explore techniques for manipulating existing textures and incorporating personal images into the virtual landscape. Through these interventions, participants will challenge and reinterpret the narratives and aesthetics defined by the original developers and game studios.

The workshop will introduce the emerging field of texture archeology and the networked community investigating the history of images such as cobble_stone.jpg. The event will explore issues of labour that lie behind computer games, as well as the hidden infrastructures beyond the game software.

Takeaways:
gain an insight in modding as a practice for artistic appropriation 
gain a basic understanding of working with textures for 3D models in games
have the chance to creatively and critically engage with video game culture by creating their own projects

Duration: 2,5h

Materials and knowledge required:
Images you want to insert into the game (optional)
Laptop (ideally with Adobe Photoshop installed)

Free of charge. Registration required!

THE AUTHORS

2girls1comp is a modding duo founded in 2023 by Marco De Mutiis (Italy, 1983) and Alexandra Pfammatter (Switzerland, 1993). Their work changes the logic of video games as an act of creative counter-play, revealing the social and economic fabric in which they are immersed: from reclaiming global digital infrastructures to commenting on free labor within the capitalist ideologies of the gaming industry, to showcasing the subtle ways in which play can influence its subjects through its mechanics.

[+] RELATED ACTIIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Alan Butler
The Production of Space
2 April–9 May 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

ARTIST TALK

Alan Butler
Material Outcomes in the Digital Subject
Wed, 2 April 2025 at 3 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Erjavčeva 23, Ljubljana

Alan Butler
The Production of Space

Curated by
Nora O’ Murchú

Exhibition
2 April–9 May 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 2 April at 8 PM

Part of Tactics&Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

The Production of Space is an ongoing series of sculptures by Irish visual artist Alan Butler. It takes its name from Henri Lefebvre’s seminal text, which argued that space does not merely exist, rather it is produced through a set of complex social and economic relations. The exhibition brings together a number of works which pivot around the story of a specific 2D image-texture file called cobble_stone, which appeared across a wide array of video game titles in the 1990s. The cobble_stone image-tile originated from an asset pack which was shipped with 3D design application Alias/3, a ubiquitous application across VFX, product design, simulation, and video game industries in the early 90s.

A conspiratorial story emerged from this discovery via a community of online media archeologists/sleuths called Render96 and 64History, who participate in collaborative explorations of digital cultures and minutiae on GitHub. In their account of the history of this digital asset, the appearance of the cobble_stone texture reveals that the Alias/3 software was used by multiple video game developers of this era and beyond, and as such the architectural and aesthetic experience of video games was to some degree homogenised. The same asset produced walls and flooring in video game titles including Donkey Kong 64, Mario Kart 64, Mortal Kombat 3, Banjo-Kazooie, and Final Fantasy VII, among many others.

In Butler’s exhibition, the form of cobble_stone is resurrected both digitally and physically through a number of modes which span iconographic, architectural intervention, sculptural and live multimedia software. Here the cobble_stone icon is utilised to apply the logic of game design to the physical architecture of the gallery space, and its form is applied to real-world architectural substances as a means to produce spatial and material experiences.

THE AUTHOR

Alan Butler (Dublin, 1981) works with traditional and new media as a means to explore subjects and ideas related to digital culture and their role in the formation of realities. With a production modality that utilises materials and media from the history of image-making, his body of work often examines how 3D graphics, video games and cloud technologies function both ideologically and politically. As part of the collective ANNEX he represented Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. Recently his work has been exhibited at V&A (2024), transmediale/Akademie der Künste (2023), The Photographers’ Gallery (2022) and Fotomuseum Winterthur (2021), among many others.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

ARTIST TALK

Alan Butler
Material Outcomes in the Digital Subject
Wed, 2 April 2025 at 3 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Erjavčeva 23, Ljubljana

WORKSHOP

2girls1comp
I AM IN YOUR GAME – Reappropriating Game Spaces Through Texture Replacement
Wed, 2 April 2025 at 4.30 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Model: unisex
Size: XL

Price: 25€ + shipping

T-shirt of the 16th edition of tactics&practice, the annual discursive programme by Aksioma dedicated to art, society and technology.

Are You a Software Update? interrogates how software systems govern interaction, perception, and decision-making. The programme considers the logics of participation embedded in platforms, applications, and networked environments, asking where the space for collective organisation and intervention still lies.

MORE

Price: 5€
Language: English

The Girl is a paradox, at once hypervisible and impossible to define. Despite cultural efforts to erase or redefine her, she persists, mutating through media, politics and technology. She is not just an aesthetic persona, but an active force, capable of absorbing and subverting ideological narratives. By tracing her intertwining with AI, consumerism and gender politics, Quicho reveals the Girl’s extraordinary abilities: she can escape control and, in so doing, never truly disappears.

Alex Quicho is a theorist, artist and research director based in London. Her practice incorporates critical writing, performative lectures and moving image, with a focus on how emerging technologies warp social reality and vice versa. She studied critical writing at the Royal College of Art and teaches narrative theory for MA Narrative Environments at Central Saint Martins. Her work has been featured in Wired, Frieze, Dazed, Vogue, Spike, The Face, MIT Technology Review and more.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 16 pp | B/W | soft cover | 2025
ISBN 978-961-7173-58-1

Noura Tafeche
The Internet Is a Horrible Place and I’m Here to Make It Worse: a Kawayoku Journey

Workshop
26 February 2025, 2–5 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

Part of Tactics & Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?

The workshop is inspired by The Kawayoku Inception, the research project by Noura Tafeche that delves into the political-artistic value of cuteness and the permanent status of performativity and hypersexualisation on social media as agents of a growing trend towards the aestheticisation of violence.

The project investigates contemporary digital evanescence, the visual reformulation of violence, unconventional recruitment strategies and militarised entertainment under new taxonomies in research areas ranging from ‘Israeli’ and US military propaganda and recruitment strategies translated into choreographies and dance challenges, to the weeb alt-right imagery intertwined with the fan-art of cute manga, passing through video games and the Second Amendment, gun advocates, war enthusiasts or armies employing anime and kawaii aesthetics and rape culture.

From this research, conducted over four years on popular social media and remote online micro-communities, an archive has been built that catalogues almost 30,000 files (screenshots, memes, posts, videos, etc.) with a ‘geographical map’ of the digital platforms where the phenomenon proliferates.

During the workshop, the artist guides participants through an intricate network of niche telegram channels, discord servers, popular subreddits, official and fake user accounts and bases, providing them with a strategic toolbox for investigating and analysing fringe Internet communities that are involved, in different ways and degrees, in the production and reproduction of online violence.

THE AUTHOR

Noura Tafeche is a visual artist, onomaturge and independent researcher working in between installations, videos, neologisms, archiving practices, laboratories, experimental applied methodologies and miniature drawings. Her areas of research expand on the subjects of visual culture and its techno-political implications with a focus on operational images, digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches and meme culture, philosophy of language and visual representation of speculative imaginaries. She has exhibited internationally in various contexts, including at Pirelli Hangar Biccoca, Tainan Art Museum and transmediale.

[+] RELATED ACTIIVITIES

EXHIBITION

Noura Tafeche
Annihilation Core Inherited Lore ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶
24 February–28 March 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

LECTURE PERFORMANCE

Noura Tafeche, Alex Quicho
She’s Evil, Most Definitively Subliminalhttps://aksioma.org/ayasu/conference/shes-evil-most-definitively-subliminal/
25 February 2025 at 3 PM
Kino Šiška, Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana

PUBLICATION

The Kawayoku Tales: Aestheticisation of Violence in Military, Gaming, Social Media Cultures and Other Stories
PostScriptUM #51

► ORDER

Noura Tafeche
Annihilation Core Inherited Lore ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶

Exhibition
24 February–26 March 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
TUE, 24 February at 7 PM

Part of Tactics&Practice #16: Are You A Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Cute eyes, thirst trap hotties, cosy rugs, soft pillows, and adorable trinkets – beyond these plush comforts and meticulous attention to decor, an unsettling atmosphere lurks. The popular online aesthetic operates in the service of the exaltation of war culture. Used as a lure to attract, the kawaii-fication of violence seduces and gamifies those who encounter it, welcoming the misogynistic, supremacist, and racist neo-ideologies it seeks to glorify.

Influenced by gamer-girl and otaku room aesthetics, and drawing from recent events such as NATO’s inaugural gaming tournament—where global participants competed while engaging with alliance experts—the installation accelerates these online subcultures toward an undesirable yet likely future. From a remote-controlled military operations desktop station, amidst plushies and UAV drone models, visitors can explore the evolving fusion of the military-entertainment complex and gaming culture, and their entanglements with digital militarism and modern armies’ recruiting strategies.

THE AUTHOR

Noura Tafeche is a visual artist, onomaturge and independent researcher working in between installations, videos, neologisms, archiving practices, laboratories, experimental applied methodologies and miniature drawings. Her areas of research expand on the subjects of visual culture and its techno-political implications with a focus on operational images, digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches and meme culture, philosophy of language and visual representation of speculative imaginaries. She has exhibited internationally in various contexts, including at Pirelli Hangar Biccoca, Tainan Art Museum and transmediale.

[+] RELATED ACTIVITIES

WORKSHOP

Noura Tafeche
The Internet Is a Horrible Place and I’m Here to Make It Worse
Wed, 26 February 2025 at 2 PM
The Academy of Fine Arts and Design, UL, Video, Animation and New Media, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana

FREE admission. Registration requited!

LECTURE PERFORMANCE

Noura Tafeche, Alex Quicho
She’s Evil, Most Definitively Subliminal
Tue, 25 February 2025 at 3 PM
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

PUBLICATION

The Kawayoku Tales: Aestheticisation of Violence in Military, Gaming, Social Media Cultures and Other Stories
PostScriptUM #51

► ORDER

Marko Gutić Mižimakov
Dragon Hunt

Curated by
Domen Ograjenšek

Exhibition
15 January–14 February 2025
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Opening
WED, 15 January at 7 PM

Acid-burned visions of landscapes like falling in and out of sleep in an airconditionless ride in August midday heat. A journey can take many forms. Some happen to reorient a person’s mind, offer inspiration in moments when inspiration is hard to come by; others reveal themselves as allies with the mundane and obsequious, draining those already burdened by the ins and outs of life’s small tedious obligations. Few take the route of challenging the foundations we tend to rely on.

Inspired by the tradition of Dragon Hunting described in Samuel Delany’s novel Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Dragon Hunt by Marko Gutić Mižimakov, combines machine learning, dance, and travel as tools of unencumbered ideation. The experimental short film takes on the genre of a road trip movie, inscribing it with abstract and fantastic elements that weirden and complicate the depicted landscapes of the Dalmatian Hinterland – developing them as scenes of queer exploration of mimicry, media translation and friendship. Amid these algorithmic visions, a language of shapeshifting, areal and land becoming, and dedication to the subtlest rhythms of one’s (self-)asserted jouissance.

Maya B. Kronic, Amy Ireland
Cute Accelerationism in Ljubljana

Performance lecture
5 December 2024 at 6 PM
Cukrarna, Ljubljana

Why is cuteness so powerful, and what is it doing to us? In this A/V performance based around the book Cute Accelerationism Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic will explore the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has an irresistible hold on contemporary culture.

Swamp_Matter
The Stones Only Appear To Be Non-Living

Curated by
Maja Burja

Exhibition
27 November–20 December 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

Countless drops carve underground cavities into a mass of limestone – rituals, graves, shelters at the gates to the underground – an explorer’s descent into the dark mouth of a cave – smooth wet surfaces wind into the unknown depth – the flash of a magnesium strip – sediments, speleothems, draperies, columns, rimstone pools – pitons, carbide lamps, electricity, concrete – ultrasonic bat screeches – floods, alluvium, blowholes – the Reka River disappears into the underworld with deafening noise.

In the project The Stones Only Appear To Be Non-Living, the duo Swamp_Matter explores the karstic system of water caves as a temporally and materially manifold depository of climate history. The immersive installation has been created based on a situated and embodied research of the Škocjan Caves and builds a speculative and multilayered setting of transformations and dimensions beyond the human, which actively produces new modes of openness to the world.

In the framework of deep geological time, the seemingly eternal, atmospherically stable and petrified cave is an environment of flux. As a primordial heterotopy that combines the opposites of the living and the non-living, the known and the unknown, permanence and transitions, the ancient past and a distant future, it represents a glitch in the history of appropriating natural environments – an unrecognisable, uneven and changeable area that resists clear boundaries and dividing lines, even to the surface.  

A zone of constant percolation into the depths, opening up ever new inaccessible areas, and a simultaneous constant accumulation of sediments and overground material is formed by the Reka River, which, in the installation, becomes a vessel for the heterochronic narrative of the underground. The passage between various dimensions of the river – from droplets to the ponor – is channelled by sound, which dissolves bodies and guides them underground.

The researchers attempt to build an interface for interacting with the underground world beyond observation or reading using multiple – insufficient, partial, failed and contradictory – means of mediation. They thus articulate a new site that accepts the glitch in its entirety and establishes a channel for expressing the multitude of possible dimensions of an environment that actively opposes visibility, clarity, productivity and meaning.  

In the development of new procedures of localisation, they combine organic, soil and technological elements – discrete series of data points, surface captures with photogrammetry, procedural (human and automated) reconstructions of deep-time sediments, casts of once stolen cave formations, models between the physical and the digital and projections of growth algorithms. 

Hyperlocalised and fragmented artefacts erode the image of a non-living and permanent landscape, outlining a new, unknown and onto-epistemologically open terrain. They open a new area of sensitivity that emphasises the instability of our own ground in the wake of the depths of the Earth’s crust, from which the horror of the Planet as an indifferent, unrepresentable and uncontrollable world-without-us leaks. 

Price: 20€
Language: English

(un)real data ☁️ – (🧊)real effects explores the inherent ambiguity of data as an opportunity to not only describe the world but strategically intervene in it. Is it possible to create specific real-world outcomes by modifying our data streams? Can we intentionally produce data to interact with an algorithmic environment that is opaque, elusive and at the same time all-encompassing? In this book, the authors and artists explore the production of unreal data as acts of resistance and opposition, and as attempts to carve out small and often temporary spaces of agency and autonomy when faced with systems that seem to leave little room for imagination and choice. 

With texts by Régine Debatty, Xiaowei R. Wang, Günseli Yalçınkaya, Milia Xin Bi and Thomas Spies, artworks by Simon Weckert and Total Refusal, and a collaborative project by Selena Savić, Gordan Savičić and !Mediengruppe Bitnik.

EN | 10.5 x 16.7 cm | 192 pp | B/W and 1/32 colour | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-57-4

Related event: Tactics & Practice #15: (Un)real Data – Real Effects