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Tactics&Practice #16: Are You a Software Update?
Ljubljana, February–June 2025
How does software shape action? What does it mean to act in systems designed to optimise, administrate, and neutralise participation? Can we find agency within infrastructures that continuously update us?
For the 16th edition of tactics&practice, Aksioma’s discursive programme exploring contemporary investigative art, society, and new technologies, 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.
The properties of software—scalability, acceleration, and fragmentation—have transformed it into a power of unprecedented influence. After living through countless updates, we now inhabit a fully fascist operating system—a pervasive, enclosed infrastructure that redefines our everyday lives and blurs the line between agency and performance. Governed by automation, interfaces, and algorithmic control, this system dictates participation, visibility, and interaction, embedding compliance into its very design. As software-imposed terms and conditions structure our relations within this system, how might subterfuge, secrecy, and deceit become frameworks to move beyond resistance—allowing us to manipulate, evade, and repurpose its structures to build new systems of solidarity, equity, and collective action?
Taking place across various venues in Ljubljana in 2025, this year’s edition includes an opening conference followed by a series of exhibitions, artist talks, workshops, commissioned essays and podcast episodes, bringing together artists, theorists, and researchers whose work examines the conditions under which action becomes possible in a reality shaped by software governance.
Software does not merely mediate participation—it dictates it. It embeds control within interfaces, automates governance through terms and conditions, and configures compliance through algorithmic sorting, surveillance, and behavioural prediction. Platform algorithms decide what is visible, what language can circulate, and which voices are amplified. Engagement is engineered, emotions are manipulated, dissent is neutralised, and behaviour is nudged toward profit-driven metrics. Software does not just manage participation—it recalibrates subjectivity, training users to internalise its logic.
This edition of tactics&practice explores how action operates within these conditions and considers the strategies available to navigate or redirect them. Examining how software exerts control over emotion, financial structures, and legal frameworks, the programme questions how these same systems might also become sites for intervention. If affect is weaponised to sustain engagement, how might tactics of misdirection, feigned compliance, and emotional redirection be deployed against the system? If economic extraction is central to platform governance, can strategic withdrawal, resource misallocation, boycotts, or financial opacity disrupt its logics? If law and language are encoded into software’s terms of service, can legal ambiguities, automated enforcement gaps, or linguistic obfuscation be exploited to create new conditions for agency? By critically examining the fascist operating system as both a structure of control and a site of potential action, Are You a Software Update? asks how subterfuge, secrecy, and deceit might offer the means to operate within—and against—the logics of automated governance.
Nora O’ Murchú