Are You A Software Update?
Kick-off Conference
25 February 2025
Kino Šiška
Trg prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana
Are you a software update? Are you compliant with your favourite platforms’ favourite terms and conditions? Does your content conform to community standards? Are your biases amplified by algorithmic biases?
In today’s ecosystem of data realities, software tirelessly updates—silently determining what we do, see, or say. Connective and networked, it mutates and proliferates through algorithms, classifiers, and processes, narrowing the conditions of participation and governance. From the shadow banning of political movements to the weaponisation of content moderation, software has become a tool of domination, subjugation, and oppression. A reality-reordering device, it operates as a fascist operating system—where participation demands assimilation, and noncompliance risks erasure.
As digital utopias lie long forgotten, platforms consolidate power under the guise of connectivity. Embedded in everyday subjectivities and desires, the fascist operating system takes root, diminishing the common ground between online and offline, surfacing at different scales. Lately, our online environment feels like a minefield of political distraction, manipulation, isolation, and consumption—fracturing collective politics while reviving reactionary dreams of the past. Engagement is engineered, emotions are manipulated to sustain participation, dissent is algorithmically suppressed, and visibility is dictated by profit-driven metrics. If resistance is continuously administered and co-opted, how do we navigate our entanglement with digital realities? What possibilities exist to move beyond resistance to forge new forms of action, agency, and collective organisation?
Interrogating how the internet, as a constructed space, has come to dominate our understanding of the world, Are You a Software Update? confronts the pervasive influence of software systems in shaping our interactions and perceptions. Examining the shifting boundaries between agency and automation, the self and the system, the conference participants reflect on the fragility and exploitation of our informational ecosystems and ask where action and collective organisation can emerge within software systems that continuously update us.
- Many art and tech “bros” would argue that Quicho and Tafeches’ work is speculative. The Girls are fighting back, to prove that girlhood and cuteness are SO REAL—revealing how illusions, subliminals, and kawaii-fication shape our deepest beliefs.
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Domen Pal / Aksioma - Clea Bourne, Daphne Dragona and Nelly Y. Pinkrah tackle software’s planetary and societal ambitions, from terraforming tools, “green panopticons,” and world-making language. While tech optimists promise global solutions and interventions, these talks explore how Earth, society and communication are often treated as mere systems to be optimized or exploited. By examining both ecological and cultural stakes, they invite us to consider what actions might care for the planet—and how rethinking language as technology opens up sites for collective transformation.
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+ Conversation moderated by Nora O'Murchú
Domen Pal / Aksioma - As conflicts escalate worldwide, it feels like peace has become a naive fantasy—displaced by militarization, populism, and a constant state of anxiety. In this session, Donatella Della Ratta, Lesia Kulchynska, and Iva Ramuš Cvetkovič explore how geopolitics—once perceived as distant—now shape our daily realities, influenced by historical narratives, propaganda, AI-generated content, and rigid frameworks. By examining these forces, the speakers aim to glimpse new ways of envisioning possible futures.
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+ Conversation moderated by Neja Berger
Domen Pal / Aksioma