Tactics&Practice [podcast]

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.

Smart cities across the world are pioneering chatbots, autonomous vehicles and AI technologies to help streamline bureaucratic services, facilitate police recruitment, fill in potholes or locate resources at the library. Could algorithmic systems of control and governance be applied to all public services? Could an ultra-efficient AI kitten centralise and impersonate all the services, authorities and regulations that make a large city function? Artist, designer and academic Pinar Yoldas believes this is a plausible and perhaps desirable scenario. Why wouldn’t a loving and cute robot be better at running the lives of citizens than human high-ranking officials?

Pinar Yoldas
https://www.pinaryoldas.info

Speculative Biologies
https://www.pinaryoldas.info/WORK/Speculative-Biologies-2008

Kitty AI: Artificial Intelligence for Governance
https://www.pinaryoldas.info/The-Kitty-AI-Artificial-Intelligence-for-Governance-2016

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: Pinar Yoldas

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] E9: When an AI Governs Your City [w/ Pinar Yoldas] appeared first on Aksioma.

Can everything – including vision, flexibility, imagination and other skills often associated with creative practices – be turned into data? Should artists feel threatened by AIs that compose music, make animation movies or write novels? Or is there something intrinsically uncomputable in the artistic mind? Are predictive algorithms creators’ friends or foes? Can you automate artistic processes and gestures?

Artist Sanela Jahić collaborates with engineers, lecturers in creative and social computing as well as experts in health informatics to investigate workers’ subordination to machinery, the possible automation of artistic practices and the role of algorithms in the transition towards authoritarianism.

Sanela Jahic
https://sanelajahic.com

NO TO AI, YES TO A NON-FASCIST APPARATUS
https://sanelajahic.com/works/no-to-ai-yes-to-a-non-fascist-apparatus

Books and authors mentioned in the conversation:

Matko Meštrović
https://monoskop.org/Matko_Me%C5%A1trovi%C4%87

Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 2007 (Basic Books)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

Dan McQuillan, Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, 2022 (Bristol University Press)
https://danmcquillan.org/pages/book.html

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: Sanela Jahić

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] E8: Taming AI, Playing AI [w/ Sanela Jahić] appeared first on Aksioma.

Darknet markets, identity shielding, bots and cryptocurrencies have revolutionised commerce and society, each in its own way. What happens when you bring all these disrupting ingredients together? Doma Smoljo and Carmen Weisskopf from !Mediengruppe Bitnik created a piece of software that randomly buys goods and services on the darknet and then gets them shipped to an art gallery. Alongside the passport scan and the odd pair of fake designer sneakers, the artists gained insights into who or what is legally responsible when a bot buys illicit goods, the emergence of new grey zones and the quality of the services provided by sellers on darkmarkets.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org

Random Darknet Shopper
https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/r

What Happens When a Software Bot Goes on a Darknet Shopping Spree?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/software-bot-darknet-shopping-spree-random-shopper

ISSA – Island School of Social Autonomy
https://issa-school.org

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: !Mediengruppe Bitnik 

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] E7: Solidarity, Perils and Ethics on Darknet Markets [w/ !Mediengruppe Bitnik] appeared first on Aksioma.

Internet has obliterated borders, distances and other hallmarks of geography, making us forget its material reality: its data centres, wires, routers, processors and a vast network of intercontinental cables. Artist Evan Roth has travelled the globe to make infrared videos of coastal landscapes where fiberoptic submarine cables emerge from the sea to enable communication across oceans.
Contemplating the infrastructure that makes and shapes the internet helps us see through the digital noise, find new ways to share space with people we’ve never met and delineate a more complex picture of the vulnerabilities and complexities that shape the dynamics and geopolitics of 21st-century communication systems.

Evan Roth
https://www.evan-roth.com

Red Lines
https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/red-lines

Books mentioned in the conversation:

Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, 2012 (Ecco)
https://www.andrewblum.net/tubes-2

Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, 2014 (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062598/thepeoplesplatform

Arden Reed, Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell, 2019 (University of California Press)
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520300583/slow-art

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: Evan Roth 

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] E6: Chasing the Physicality of the Internet [w/ Evan Roth] appeared first on Aksioma.

Can you make video games about environmental justice or labour? How about religion, the military, gun violence, mass incarceration, immigration or the Anthropocene? Can you entertain players with such hard-hitting matters? Can you use games to make players reflect on ethics, politics and the economy? Since 2003, MOLLEINDUSTRIA has been devising “artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games”. What started as a project to create mordant parodies soon became one of the most iconic pioneering works of critical video games

MOLLEINDUSTRIA
https://www.molleindustria.org

LIKELIKE Gallery
https://likelike.org

Phone Story
http://www.phonestory.org

The New York Times Simulator
https://molleindustria.itch.io/the-new-york-times-simulator

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: Paolo Pedercini from MOLLEINDUSTRIA 

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] E5: Social Justice, Satire and Video Games [w/ Paolo Pedercini from MOLLEINDUSTRIA] appeared first on Aksioma.

What does it feel to infiltrate or work alongside structures of power that most of us find impersonal and intimidating? How do you capitalise on the systemic loopholes and quirks inherent to institutions of authority such as intelligence agencies, corporations, bureaucracies and law enforcement agencies? Artist, author and filmmaker Jill Magid makes use of small institutional quirks to establish an intimate connection with people “on the inside” and probe the emotional, philosophical and legal tensions between the individual and the institutions that govern our lives.

Jill Magid
https://www.jillmagid.co

Authority to Remove
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/level-2-gallery-jill-magid

The Proposal
https://www.jillmagid.com/film

Watch on Apple TV
https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-proposal/umc.cmc.6lwx7utr6f31iwher2e57d631

Amazon Prime
https://www.amazon.com/Proposal-Jill-Magid/dp/B07RXP8377

Collecteurs
https://www.collecteurs.com/article/jill-magid-the-proposal

And Oscilloscope
https://theproposal.oscilloscope.net/

Jerzy Kosinski, Cockpit, 1975
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockpit_(novel)

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: Jill Magid 

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] E4: Up-Close and Personal with Impersonal Power Structures [w/ Jill Magid] appeared first on Aksioma.

In 2000, during the presidential race between George Bush and Al Gore, a group of “Maverick Austrian Business People” launched a platform that gave US voters the possibility to auction off their votes to bidders on the internet. Thirteen US states attempted to shut down the project with temporary restraining orders and injunctions. The media circus around the project was mind-boggling. As for the maverick business people behind the scandalous proposal, they were not entrepreneurs, they were artists: Liz Haas and Lúzius Bernhard from UBERMORGEN. Their artistic intervention went viral long before “becoming viral” was part of our vocabulary. What does this say about the enduring confusion between fact and fiction, the opacity of democratic institutions under capitalism and the ease with which a duo of provocateurs can manipulate the attention of the mass media?

UBERMORGEN
https://www.ubermorgen.com/UM/index.html

[V]ote-auction
https://www.vote-auction.net

PMC Wagner Arts
https://www.pmcwagner.art

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: UBERMORGEN

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] E3: How Much is Your Democracy Worth? [w/ UBERMORGEN] appeared first on Aksioma.

The discussion about the growing list of looted and illicitly acquired museum treasures is one that most Westerners would rather not think about. Unless a scandal, a protest, a movie or a contemporary artwork forces ex-colonising countries to confront the firm grip that their institutions maintain on access to knowledge, cultural materials and the global narratives of history. Since 2016, Nora Al-Badri has been developing artworks that use AI, deepfake technology and 3D scanning to spark debates about power imbalances and ethical museum practices.

Nora Al-Badri
https://www.nora-al-badri.de

The Other Nefertiti
https://aksioma.org/the.other.nefertiti

The Last Museum
https://www.kw-berlin.de/thelastmuseum/nora-1

Host: Régine Debatty
Guest: Nora Al-Badri 

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] E2: Decolonising Museum Collections [w/ Nora Al-Badri] appeared first on Aksioma.