(un)real data | Ep.#5: The Liminal Vibes Beyond Digital Conformity [w/ Valentina Tanni]
Internet aesthetics like vaporwave, the Backrooms and weirdcore seem to offer glimpses of alternate realities beyond the threshold of the real. From Freud’s “uncanny” to hauntology’s spectral futures, these are aesthetics that revel in the strange, the eerie and the infinitely ambiguous – a messy, chaotic antidote to the ruthlessly curated digital landscapes we’re fed today. Art historian and curator Valentina Tanni draws from her latest book Exit Reality and helps us unpack how these liminal aesthetics tap into feelings of ambiguity, the unsettling familiar and nostalgia for futures that never were – a reaction, perhaps, to the relentless corporate co-option and algorithmic control that has degraded so much of online culture into a bland, high-affect “midness”.
(un)real data | Ep.#4: How Mind-Flattening Algorithmic Tweaks Ruined Posting [w/ Günseli Yalcinkaya]
If we paraphrase McLuhan, today’s medium is the algorithm: how is this universal mediator shaping us as content creators and consumers? How does it feel to be online amid different polarising forces, when consensus reality has completely broken down? Günseli Yalcinkaya, writer and researcher specialising in youth and internet culture, has been immersing herself in the insane hidden pits of the internet to shed light on central tendencies and viral phenomena – from homogenised beauty standards imposed by filters to psyops, military e-girl influencers and heads of nation states who post memes on X – through which our online world is becoming increasingly both mid and weird.
What exactly is in the images generated by AI? Is it possible to decode training datasets and detect biases that fusion models, such as Dall-E or Midjourney, reproduce? Eryk Salvaggio, researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence, suggests a method that enables anyone to peel off the layers behind the datasets. Exploiting the ghost human labour needed to create images and label them, the full automation of AI dehumanises the representation of the real, reducing it to clusters of pixels rearranged by statistical mathematical models. However, human agency and creativity are nested between the dots of the pixels, and they still give us the power to scratch at the surfaces that algorithms are constantly trying to reproduce.
(un)real data | Ep.#2: Could We Stop Reproducing a Deepfake Past? [w/ Wendy Chun]
Predictive models based on big data are founded on the idea that knowing the past enables us to predict the future, but what kind of future are we constructing when the models are based on a deepfake version of the past? Correlation has overtaken causation, while homophily shadows differences across these models that are not only applied in social media platforms’ algorithms, but also in policing predictives or risk assessment systems. We discuss how these practices reproduce bias and generate self-fulfilling prophecies with Wendy Chun, professor of New Media, Director of the Digital Democracies Institute and author of numerous books. Is it possible to exit the default world of endless reproducibility and conceive of a different future from what has been left out in the past?
(un)real data | Ep.#1: (In)dividuality and the Quantified Self [w/ Felix Stalder]
The rise of computation in the 1950s shifted society to one constructed purely in commercial terms, where selling and buying have become the main social relation and every possible human form of contact is reimagined as a service or a product. What does this imply for the self? When individuals are broken up into parts that are measurable as data streams, the self is quantified and life is understood through numbers, where the ultimate number is profit. Professor of Digital Culture and Network Theory Felix Stalder discusses the ambiguity of data, the limits of computation and what interpretations might exist beyond the world as a set of measurements.
Eyal Weizman is a Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures. He founded Forensic Architecture, where he helped develop a methodology – counter forensics – for analysing cases of human rights violations around the world to provide new evidence against official narratives in international human rights courts. Counter forensics is a response to structural limitations – such as not having access to the crime scene – and makes openly available what is concealed from the public eye. Counter forensics takes all the time needed to scan and interpret enormous amounts of data and images, trying to find clues that are already in the public domain, but which we don’t know how to look at and interconnect. Secrets can be deconstructed by following the traces they leave in the visible world,harvesting what is out there, but nobody is looking at.
Guests: Urška Henigman, radio journalist at RTV Slovenia; Matevž Čelik, architect, critic, editor, researcher; Marko Peljhan, conceptual artist and researcher.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
(re)programming | Ep. #7: Community [w/ Astra Taylor]
Talk to Your Neighbour
Astra Taylor is an international filmmaker, writer and political organiser. She was part of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and has been one of its best narrators and critics. Since then, in a series of legendary attempts to improve protest movements, she has become one of the essential chroniclers of contemporary acts of collective resistance. She is the co-founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union organising to renegotiate and resist debts, that succeeded in changing first the narrative around student debt loans and then eventually the politics. In a media landscape dominated by social media, we want everything to go viral, but small groups of well-organised people can have a larger impact than millions protesting in the streets or online. Mass is not engaging, and the individual is not the scale for politics and change: the level for democracy is the collective. Talking to neighbours and breaking conversational taboos are the first steps for real change.
Guests: Tjaša Pureber, activist and social movement researcher; Barbara Rajgelj, human rights activist; Asja Hrvatin, social worker and activist for the rights of refugees.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
(re)programming | Ep. #6: The Cloud [w/ Joana Moll]
Everything is Not Connected
Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin-based artist and researcher. Her work moves towards a crossover between art and investigative journalism with the aim to make public the hidden costs of techno-capitalism. Back in 2013, her research began with an epiphany: services like Google do not come for free, without environmental costs. As her research has proven since then, not only does the internet have a huge impact on ecosystems, but e-commerce services, browsers, dating apps and surveillance systems extract data and energy from unwitting users. What happens when we purchase an item on Amazon? Who owns the profile images posted on dating apps? How many trees are needed to absorb the amount of CO2 generated by the global visits to google.com every second? Through the artistic outputs of her findings, Joana Moll transforms these revelations into tangible concepts fostering awareness in the collective consciousness of the footprint caused by our use of the Cloud.
Guests: Dušan Caf, director of the Digitas Institute for better digital accessibility; Luka Frelih, artist, programmer and hacker; Filip Muki Dobranić, hacker, philosopher, sociologist.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Kate Crawford is a leading scholar on the social implications of artificial intelligence. Her book ATLAS OF AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence is the culmination of a five-year-long research into materiality of AI. Far from being immaterial, AI is made of flesh, sweat and fossil fuels, and is not neutral. Also, AI stands as one of the most concentrated industries of the world, with only five or six companies holding the pipelines of the data, designed to serve the capital, or for policing and for military purposes. Acquainting this is essential to resistance and change, because it’s by abstracting away the processes through which AI is made that the actual modes of production can persist. However,no political situation lasts forever and no technology is invulnerable: these planetary computational systems can be decentralised and become useful to humans and the planet.
Guests: Sanela Jahić, intermedia artist; Lenart J. Kučić, journalist and podcaster; Nika Mahnič, researcher of the digital condition(ality).
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Future is not only about data and trends, it is about imagination. The work of designer and filmmaker Anab Jain transports people into the future. The evolving installation Mitigation of Shock by her studio Superflux envisions a random apartment in the London of 2050 or in a Singapore that has become a flooded city in 2219. In this conversation, Jain gives the listeners an emotional vade mecum to imagine and possibly shape the future, starting with equipping themselves with many options and possibilities in order to explore those prospects and interconnections, then asking which decisions that we are taking today may affect them in the future. As indicated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, there is an urgency to reassess our relationship with what we call “nature” – we have to think of ourselves as one species among others, who are our companions.
Guests: Saša Spačal, post-media artist; Anja Planišček, associate professor at Faculty of Architecture, Ljubljana; Špela Petrič, new media artist and former scientific researcher.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
(re)programming | Ep. #3: Energy [w/ Holly Jean Buck]
Can We Repair the Climate?
Holly Jean Buck works at the interface of environmental sociology, international development, and science and technology studies. In her book After Geoengineering, she takes a deep dive into the envisioning, development and deployment of tactics and schemes for deliberately intervening in the environment, including Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). What we have to do to restore the planet is clearer than ever, we have the technologies and the money to do it. The obstacle, then, is social and political. We should acknowledge that what we are facing is not a climate crisis but an ecological crisis, one where people need to have a say in the plan and where specific exit strategies for every country and reality must emerge through building a consensus in communities.
Guests: Rok Kranjc, sustainability transitions researcher, translator and editor; Senka Šifkovič Vrbica, lawyer working in the fields of legal protection of the environment; Borut Tavčar, journalist who focuses on environmental issues.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
(re)programming | Ep. #2: Infrastructure [w/ Benjamin Bratton]
An Alternative Earth
Benjamin Bratton is an American Philosopher of Technology, known for his work spanning social theory, computer science, design, AI, and for his writing on the geopolitical implications of what he terms “planetary scale computation”. In the conversation with Marta Peirano, he explores the main issues raised in The Terraforming and The New Normal, the speculative urbanism think tanks that have extensively explored alternative future trajectories for cities, considering them as planetary technologies.
To reorient and remobilise already existing technologies regimes and processes for purposes that are for the very long term and to preserve life on Earth, a renewed Copernican turn is necessary in theory and in practice: a technologically mediated departure from anthropocentric and individual perspectives.
Guests: Marko Bauer, translator, writer and editor; Miloš Kosec, architect and researcher; Miha Turšič, artist, designer and researcher.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
(re)programming | Ep. #1: Trigger [w/ Kim Stanley Robinson]
What Does it Take to Change the Future?
Kim Stanley Robinson stands as one of today’s most beloved science fiction writers and is a prominent exponent of climate fiction. In his novel The Ministry for the Future (2020), he envisions a scenario where India is struck by a devastating heatwave, resulting in the loss of millions of lives within days: soon after this tremendous tragedy, a climate response begins to take shape. Do we need such a shock for governments, or maybe some billionaire, to take radical actions against the climate crisis? Solutions to buy time before we reach the point of no return are already known and available, maybe a utopian horizon painted by literature can help us implement them. In his most bleak yet hopeful work to date, Robinson delves into the limits and possibilities of human cooperation under extreme circumstances.
Guests: Dr Lučka Kajfež Bogataj, climatologist and a pioneer in researching the impact of climate change; Dr Luka Omladič, philosopher, environmentalist and environmental analyst; Ida Hiršenfelder, sound artist and archivist.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Scale | Ep.#5: Reality as a Scalar Effect [w/ Jussi Parikka]
To complexify the notion of scale and to expand it, both historically and beyond human perception, allows us to think about scale within different academic, design and artistic vocabularies. Writer and professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, as well as visiting professor at FAMU (Prague) and Winchester School of Art (UK) Jussi Parikka has extensively researched the cultural histories and archaeologies of media and has, over the past years, focused even more on environmental media. In a recent text for Aksioma, he has addressed scale as the middle of a meddling bundle of forces, showing that the concrete techniques in which scale comes to existence and functions are ontogenetic, i.e. they bring worlds into existence. That’s why scale is inherently entwined with power and politics in very detailed ways, which is something he addresses in his recently published book Operational Imagesas well as in the slightly earlier co-edited volume in Photography Off the Scale. This fifth episode marks the culmination of the series: it is an intriguing dialogue aimed at reframing the concept of scale and at connecting all the insights and perspectives discussed in the previous episodes.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Scale | Ep.#4: Neocolonial Extraction and Surveillance [w/ Anthony Downey]
The concept of scale is related to mapping, which is intrinsically related to colonisation and neocolonial military practices. Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University), draws a historical line from the development of cartographic devices and photogrammetry in the 18th and 19th centuries to the neocolonial extraction of data through AI-powered models of hyper-surveillance. Utilised for training neural networks and refining algorithms, these methods of data extraction effectively redefine the future of kinetic and non-kinetic warfare. Programmed within such systems, the operative and rationalising logic of algorithms are, Downey proposes, complicit in increasingly reductive determinations of what constitutes life and death in conflict zones.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Scale | Ep.#3: Russian Neocolonialism as Demonic Possession [w/ Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich]
Infrastructures of abnormous scale are the materialisation of neocolonialism. Megabridges, power plants, military bases are means of dispossession, invasion, extraction perpetrated by bigger countries upon smaller sovereign states. Media artists and interdisciplinary researchers Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich have developed a method called “applied demonology”, which combines CGI, mediaeval demonology and satellite investigation to interrogate the spectre of colonial violence. They have used this approach to shed light on the way Russia has possessed Ukraine, Belarus and Syria like a demon that parasites its host and always breaks its promises.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Scale | Ep.#2: Alternative Networks in Cuba [w/ Steffen Köhn & Nestor Siré]
Alternative community-based data distribution networks on the local scale have emerged in Cuba as a consequence of the economic sanctions imposed on the country in recent decades. German anthropologist Steffen Köhn and Cuban media artist Nestor Siré shed light on the unique materiality and significance of these networks, built to overcome the limitations of internet access in Cuba. In the current capitalist, consumerist form of internet, characterised by closed platforms, we are fed content chosen for us by algorithms, whereas informal infrastructures allow their users, makers and content creators to be the protagonists of their own choices – and allow us to envision decentralised, non-commercial and collective interactions on the web.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
Scale | Ep.#1: Matter as a Subject [w/ Laura Tripaldi]
On the nanoscale, materials can appear as vibrant, lively subjects that can even have political implications. Laura Tripaldi, author of Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), is an expert on nanotechnology who worked in industrial research before shifting her focus on philosophical and theoretical fields. She has been exploring our relationship to technology and materials we use everyday, and has proposed a different perspective on non-human and non-living entities, challenging us to consider them as active rather than passive matter.
The project konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art was chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
In the current phase of late capitalism, we are experiencing a crucial contradiction every day. On the one hand, the increasing automation of productive processes is apparently making John Maynard Keynes’s promise of a post-work society not only more real, but also closer; on the other hand, labour – far from disappearing – is colonising and altering any given moment and aspect of our existence. The rise of precarious labour has freed us from the alienation of a permanent job, but has also made our lives more unstable and anxious, and is producing new social diseases. The increasing automation has made us more unemployed – a condition we are frantically trying to escape with micro-labours, turning us into “entrepreneurs of the self”.
Simultaneously, the explosion of the information society, with the rise of personal media devices – such as the smartphone – and social media, has brought a pantagruelic growth of what has been called “peripheral work”: the daily, fragmented, uninterrupted, unwaged labour we do for ourselves – reading and answering emails, shaping our online identity on multiple platforms – and, increasingly, for the companies that make profit from our online interactions and data. Every time we run a search, send a message, upload content, consume content, solve a “captcha”, authorise an app to access our position, monitor our walks or our sleep, we are working for somebody. Even the increasingly developing field of artificial intelligence, from machine vision to neural networks to chatbots, while promising to automate all the things, is actually generating more invisible, unregulated, underpaid human labour, and it is often educated by our online behaviours.
The result is that labour, far from fading out, has overrun the working days and hours and become a 24/7 activity: but instead of making us wealthier, happier and more stable, has made us more anxious and poor, and is depriving us of the future. This evolution and crisis of labour is the subject of an ongoing artistic research, for various reasons: first, because it is correctly perceived as one of the aspects of a more general crisis of the future and its imaginaries, to which artistic practice cannot but respond; second, because artistic labour has been inevitably affected by this evolution, from all points of view: precarious by definition, based on self-entrepreneurship and on means of production that have been radically changed by globalisation, outsourcing and automation; finally, because the evolution of labour allows us to observe the “man-machine complexity” that is one of the crucial nodes of our present.
Hyperemployment – a word borrowed from media theorist Ian Bogost, describing “the Exhausting Work of the Technology User” – is a year-long programme focused on post-work, online labour, AI and automation, conceived as an attempt to scrutinise and explore some of these issues. Featuring a group exhibition with the same name, a symposium, several solo exhibitions, and a final catalogue presentation, Hyperemployment covers a variety of topics, from automation to the gig economy, the end of free time and self-improvement apps, social media fatigue and quantification, AI and the post-work society.
