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€

(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 | BW and 1/32 colour | soft cover | 2024
ISBN 978-961-7173-57-4

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

Gaia Radić
Chora

Curated by
Maja Burja

Exhibition
2–24 October 2024
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana

Part of U30+ production programme for supporting young artists

With her immersive video installation Chora, artist Gaia Radić introduces a new chapter in the body of virtual worlds that perform as perceptual narratives and transform the spaces they inhabit into autopoietic worlding systems.

In Chora, the space waits in stillness for a visitor. Upon their arrival, a split point of view emerges within the expansive virtuality. Through two opposing apertures, a geological terrain, seemingly unbound by any specific site, begins to unfold. The world, comprised of interconnected lagoons, appears to overflow with an ethereal primordial liquid, keeping the space in constant flux.

This steady stream guides the visitor’s eye along the creased topology that is, in turn, slowly winding its way through the viewer as well. In this encounter, the viewer’s perceptual organs become channels through which the space reflects upon itself. Chora both shapes and is shaped by its material host and realises its generative potential when the physical and virtual realms meet through the viewer’s perception.

The heterotopic space functions as a sieve where one world is reflected and refracted into another, producing a self-referential reality that continually reforms itself. For as soon as self-formulation begins, dissipation follows. When the viewer leaves, the landscape settles, and Chora returns to its dormant state until the arrival of a new body.