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.

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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 6 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.

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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!

Price: 10€

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 (Printed)

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.

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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

Price: 5€

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 | COLOUR | soft cover | 2025
ISBN 978-961-7173-58-1 (Printed)
ISBN 978-961-7173-63-5 (Digital)

Related event: She’s Evil, Most Definitively Subliminal