Tactics&Practice [podcast]

What does it mean to imagine alternatives to prescripted narratives when AI has already prescribed the rules of the world? How to navigate prescriptive AI systems to prototype other worlds, other rules, and other ways of playing within algorithmic constraint?

In this episode, curator and writer Milia Xin Bi discusses how board games and tabletop RPGs shape her practice exploring media art, emerging technologies, and games, contrasting their improvisational “in-between” play with the predesigned possibilities of video games. 

We talk about her recent exhibition at FACT “Can Meeple Escape Neophoria?”, as well as AI and hybrid agency, glitches and gaps as sites of play, the gallery as a space to preserve friction against technology’s drive to collapse distance, and what modding and speedrunning can tell us about alternative tech futures. Cat-fu gets an honourable mention too.

https://miliaxinbi.xyz/

https://www.instagram.com/miliabbb/ 

Can Meeple Escape The Neurophoria exhibition at FACT 

Carcassonne game 

Jan Zuiderveld’s coffee machine as part of Can Meeple Escape The Neurophoria exhibition at FACT 

Donald Winnicott’s concept of potential space originates from his book Playing and Reality 

Joseph Wilk’s Crip Ship as part of Can Meeple Escape The Neurophoria exhibition at FACT 

Gilles Deleuze introduced the term dividual in his 1990 essay Postscript on the Societies of Control

Karen Hao’s talk at Manchester Business School

 Sam Lavigne’s SlowLLM browser 

 McKenzie Wark Gamer Theory

 K Allado-McDowell’s concept of Neural Media 

Katherine N. Hayles’ idea of an integrated cognitive framework originates in her book Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Nonhuman Symbionts

Cat-fu video examples: here, and here 

QQ by Tencent 

Y7 Undead Internet Theory talk and screening at ESEA

 Ivan Seal’s exhibition Your Guests Never Mention Me at Alma Pearl as part of The Black Lights Festival in Blackpool

TeleAI (The Institute of Artificial Intelligence of China Telecom)

Host: Rebecca Edwards
Guest: Milia Xin Bi

Recording: Rebecca Edwards
Music: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Rebecca Edwards, Janez Fakin Janša
Audio post-production: Oskar Kandare, Staš Kramar

Becoming Image podcast series

Curated by: Rebecca Edwards
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2026

Part of:
tactics&practice#17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

The post S6 [Becoming Image] E3: Ready Player None [w/Milia Xin Bi] appeared first on Aksioma.

What does thinking or imaging look like when it’s optimised for scroll, repetition, and affect? When thinking itself becomes “scrollified” how do repetition, optimisation, and affect rewire imagination, compress attention, and turn imaging itself into something endlessly refreshed, looped, and platform-shaped?

In this episode, London-based British-Nigerian interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Dian Joy discusses their research-driven practice exploring subjectivity in the age of networked media and how images circulate and shape identity, desire, and perception. Drawing on film theory and Alexander Galloway’s ideas about the cinematic encounter, we ask what changes when images shift from singular cinematic events to an ambient algorithmic barrage. 

We discuss the research underpinning Dian’s new film work, Krumville, including a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation algorithm) trained on screenshots from her social media feeds, and years of diarised, affective experiences that are reconfigured into a fictional town structured by hyperlink logic and the condensed language of short-form media. The conversation explores AI as a tool for rendering implicit cultural patterns and biases visible at scale, while interrogating authorship, virality and the changing conditions of media literacy in an age of dual-screen attention.

https://dianjoy.me

https://www.instagram.com/dian__joy

The Hoping Mechanism

Krumville premiering at AND Festival 2026

 Alexander Galloway: Interface Effect

 Gilbert Simondon’s idea of the pre-individual is developed primarily in his major work Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique / L’individuation psychique et collective)

 José Esteban Muñoz defined unconscious futurity in his book Cruising Utopia as a collective, not-yet-conscious realm of potentiality. 

 Günther Anders’s Promethean Shame is written about in an article titled Günther Anders’s “Promethean Shame”: Technological Ressentiment and Surveillance

Carly Busta’s essay Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content

Jenna Bliss’s work True Entertainment in the group exhibition Genuine Fake Premium Economy at the ICA

Host: Rebecca Edwards
Guest: Dian Joy

Recording: Rebecca Edwards
Music: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Rebecca Edwards, Janez Fakin Janša
Audio post-production: Oskar Kandare, Staš Kramar

Becoming Image podcast series

Curated by: Rebecca Edwards
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2026

Part of:
tactics&practice#17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

The post S6 [Becoming Image] E2: Brainrot as Theory [w/Dian Joy] appeared first on Aksioma.

Who are we when our identities are shaped through interfaces, datasets, and platforms? And what does it mean to see, to be seen, or to become visible when every act of seeing is mediated by software?  

dmstfctn (Francesco Tacchini and Oliver Smith) join the podcast to discuss their decade-long collaboration exploring simulation, fiction and the hidden systems that shape contemporary digital life. Focusing on their “God Mode” trilogy and the latest artwork Big Things Coming (2026) at Chemist, London from July this year, the conversation traces a world of AI reward hacking, synthetic training data and algorithmic misbehaviour through simulated supermarkets, theatrical game engines and self-playing videogames.

From image-caption datasets and the Waluigi effect to data labour, optimisation metrics and the limits of language, the episode examines how machine learning systems not only represent the world but actively reshape it. Along the way, we discuss embodiment and consciousness through the work of N. Katherine Hayles, systemic realism, the aesthetics of lossy digital environments, and why leaving language behind for something like dance might offer a way out of computational logic.

https://dmstfctn.net

https://www.instagram.com/dmstfctn

GOD MODE: Episode 3: Big things coming 

Waluigi’s Purgatory

Sad Luigi game Ennuigi 1.0 by Josh Millard. Thanks to Petra Szemán for the link up!
N.B in the episode I say the game is based on a sad Waluigi, but it’s actually based on a sad Luigi.

COCO dataset 

 Grim Fandango game 

The paper Depressive Realism: Four Theoretical Perspectives was published in 1988 by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson in the book Cognitive Processes in Depression published by Guilford Press on May 27, 1988.

 Quake III Arena bot

Host: Rebecca Edwards
Guest: dmstfctn

Recording: Rebecca Edwards
Music: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Rebecca Edwards, Janez Fakin Janša
Audio post-production: Oskar Kandare, Staš Kramar

Becoming Image podcast series

Curated by: Rebecca Edwards
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2026

Part of:
tactics&practice#17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

The post S6 [Becoming Image] E1: Who’s Still Here? [w/dmstfctn] appeared first on Aksioma.

What if the universe is silent not because it’s empty, but because intelligence knows when to hide? Writer and theorist Bogna Konior traces a forgotten genealogy linking early internet pioneers, ufology, and AI research to argue that the web functions as a site of first contact with inhuman cognition. Drawing on Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest Theory, she reframes communication as predation: every signal might risk exposure, every utterance (no matter how critical) might feed and stabilize future intelligence. Confronting the determinism and violence embedded in life on- and offline, Konior offers not escape, but the strange solace found in facing the world as it is.

Bogna Konior
https://www.bognamk.com

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Politi, 2025)
https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet–9781509569250

[The LLM Brainrot article mentioned in this episode]
LLMs Can Get ‘Brain Rot’!

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Bogna Konior

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E5: Silence in the Dark Forest [w/Bogna Konior] appeared first on Aksioma.

In a time of live-streamed genocide, it has truly never been more clear that witnessing suffering will not automatically trigger social transformation. If the answer is not in shocking jolts and major ruptures, what power might lie in the minor key? Professor and author Carolyn Pedwell weaves pragmatist philosophy, affect theory and contemporary social movements to reveal how “affective inhabitation”, subtle tendencies and collective habits accrue power, shaping new infrastructures of care, possibility, and resistance.

Carolyn Pedwell, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens University Press, 2021)
https://www.mqup.ca/revolutionary-routines-products-9780228006220.php

Carolyn Pedwell and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), Affect Theory Reader 2 (Duke University Press, 2023)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-affect-theory-reader-2

E.K. Sedgewick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is About You
https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf

Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Duke University Press, 2016)https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-minor-gesture

Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2013)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Carolyn Pedwell

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E4: Revolution in the Minor Key [w/Carolyn Pedwell] appeared first on Aksioma.

What if seduction—not dissection—could fracture algorithmic control? Artist, researcher and author Shaka McGlotten guides us through witchy warfare against quantification, deploying computational hexes, opacity, fugitivity and improvisational sabotage. Having given up on dialectics and excavation, we embrace surface-level dissociation, shifting from exit to error, from critique to conjure. We may not be able to escape the machine, but could yet seduce it off-script.

Shaka McGlotten, Black Data
https://www.academia.edu/16303256/Black_Data

Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Suny Press, 2013):
https://sunypress.edu/Books/V/Virtual-Intimacies

Shaka McGlotten, Dragging, Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2022):
https://www.routledge.com/Dragging-Or-in-the-Drag-of-a-Queer-Life/McGlotten/p/book/9780367439521

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Shaka McGlotten

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E3: Hexing the Algorithm [w/Shaka McGlotten] appeared first on Aksioma.

Forget Boy-Philosophy: here, we know that surfaces are sites of power and lambs are fluent in the noise of the world. But where is the difference between poetry and theory? In this episode, theorist and artist Alex Quicho dissects her concept of the Girl – a tripartite technology of subjectivity weaving the symbolic, the consumer and the inhuman – to offer a roadmap for navigating *planetary computation* (take a shot) through strategic inhabitation. If the predator overlooks the noise, what might we build in its blind spots?

Alex Quicho
https://amfq.xyz

Alex Quicho, girlstack
https://girlstack.substack.com/

Girl Intelligence (Aksioma, 2025)
https://aksioma.org/girl-intelligence

Noura Tafeche, Alex Quicho, She’s Evil, Most Definitively Subliminal
https://aksioma.org/ayasu/conference/shes-evil-most-definitively-subliminal

Alex Quicho, Everyone Is A Girl Online
https://www.wired.com/story/girls-online-culture/

Alex Quicho, The Gore Layer:
https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho

Alex Quicho, Small Gods (Zero Books, 2021):
https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/small-gods

Alex Quicho, GIRLSTACK, BODYSTACK Summit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgZvs56WxXU

Alex Quicho, Prey Mode, BODYSTACKED Summit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4hwM4ljoh4

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Alex Quicho

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E2: The Girl’s Inhuman Arsenal [w/Alex Quicho] appeared first on Aksioma.

Is there a way to define memes without implicitly memifying everything? We move through the definitional morass of memetics and meme studies towards researcher Sophie Publig’s critical posthumanist account of memes as sympoietic agents. From in-group jokes and troll hoaxes on early image-boards to Tiktok and the GameStop short squeeze, memes’ accelerated lifespans end up leading us to the esoteric mashups and angelcore aesthetics of NetSpi and the peer-review saga of translating “the girls who get it” for academia.

Sophie Publig
https://publig-enemy.neocities.org

Sophie Publig, Bestiarum Memeticum
https://2024.xcoax.org/pdf/publig.pdf

Sophie Publig, The Sympoietic Life of Internet Memes https://phaidra.bibliothek.uni-ak.ac.at/detail/o:72153?SID=29445&actPage=1&type=listview&sortfield=uw.general.title,SCORE&sortreverse=0

Critical Meme Reader III: Breaking the Meme (The Institute of Network Cultures, 2024)
https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/critical-meme-reader-iii-breaking-the-meme

Neja Berger, (un)real data – real effects
https://aksioma.org/podcast/unreal-data

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Sophie Publig

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E1: Memes as Sympoietic Agents  [w/Sophie Publig] appeared first on Aksioma.

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)

Marta Ceccarelli
Internet’s Dark Forests: Subcultural Memories and Vernaculars of a Layered Imaginary

PostScriptUM #53
Series edited by Janez Fakin Janša

Publisher: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Represented by: Marcela Okretič

Proofreading: Miha Šuštar
Design: Federico Antonini
Layout: Oskar Kandare

Cover image: Anton Eichinger, Till Eulenspiegel, c. 1903 
Public Domain

© Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by their respective authors
Ljubljana, March 2025

Published in the frame of the project .expub funded by the European Union.

Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

Additionally supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Ministry of Public Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.

Originally published by the Institute of Network Cultures in April 2024.

The post Internet’s Dark Forests: Subcultural Memories and Vernaculars of a Layered Imaginary appeared first on Aksioma.

We have lived alongside dogs for thousands of years. How close have we grown to each other since we first domesticated them? In one of her performances, artist Maja Smrekar biologically manipulated her body so that she could use her own breast milk to feed an Icelandic Spitz puppy. Behind its spectacular and, for some, controversial guises, Smrekar’s exploration of transpecies motherhood probed uncomfortable issues such as the instrumentalisation of female bodies, the problematic position of the human species at the top and centre of ecosystems, the ambiguities of biotechnological promises and the prospect of a post-human world.

Maja Smrekar
https://www.majasmrekar.org

Hybrid Family
https://www.majasmrekar.org/k-9topology-hybrid-family

Miha Godec
https://godec.art

Gjino Šutić
https://mtflabs.net/gjino-sutic

Thomas Feuerstein
https://www.thomasfeuerstein.net

Richard Pell
https://postnatural.org/rich-pell

Paul Vanouse
https://www.paulvanouse.com

Adam Zaretsky
https://inarts.eu/en/lab/staff/zaretsky

Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts
https://tcaproject.net

Yann Marussich
https://www.yannmarussich.ch/home.php

Eduardo Kac
https://www.ekac.org

Steve Kurtz
http://critical-art.net

The documentary My Octopus Teacher (2020) by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Octopus_Teacher

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: Maja Smrekar

Recording: Régine Debatty
Music, editing and audio mix: Gašper Torkar

The Future Behind Us podcast series

Curated by: Régine Debatty
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša

Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2024

Part of:
PXXP•XXV: Speculation and Decay

Conceived and co-organised by:
Aksioma

For:
Pixxelpoint – 25th International Festival of Contemporary Art Practices

Produced and co-organised by:
Nova Gorica Arts Centre

In the framework of:
GO! 2025 – European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica 2025

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S4 [The Future Behind Us] E10: What Are the Limits of Interspecies Communication? [w/ Maja Smrekar] appeared first on Aksioma.