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? [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

IIs 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. [...]

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 [...]

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? [...]

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? [...]

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? [...]

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. [...]

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? [...]

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? [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Over the years, Trevor Paglen has documented operations, locations and activities that were meant to remain hidden from the public. He has tracked and photographed the world of secret satellites, flew in a helicopter over the NSA headquarters with the express purpose of taking aerial photographs of it and [...]

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”.

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? [...]

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?

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.

How to Tell

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.

COLOPHON

Host: Marta Peirano
Guest: Eyal Weizman

Editing, Audio Mix and Music: Gašper Torkar

(re)programming podcast series

Produced by Janez Fakin Janša and Marcela Okretič
for Tactics&Practice #10: (re)programming

Project coordinator: Sonja Grdina

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art
Ljubljana, 2023

Part of
Tactics&Practice
konS – Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art