Editorial Team: Flóra Barkóczi, Geert Lovink, Áron Lődi, Diana McCarty, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and János Sugár

Download conference program booklet here: Metaforum_Handout_Full_2024

Embracing the legacy of the three MetaForum conferences (1994-96), MFX continues to highlight the urgent issues of the times with a reflection on contemporary crisis surfing. The theme of PermaCrises examines the persistent breakdown of our political, societal and cultural systems, capturing the extremity of this situation through its continuality and pervasiveness.

The unique political climate of East-Central Europe, situated in a semi-periphery, generates a perspective that often feels overlooked and stagnant. In the nineties, Hungary provided a useful lens with which to view emerging social, political and technical realities – almost in slow motion – as they came into being. In keeping with this, this event seeks dust of that lens with a view that underscores the regional context, fostering dialogues about the cultural dynamics of the immediate environment, influenced by and influencing global tendencies. While some speak of a ‘stack of crises’, others use terms such as polycrisis and metacrisis. Permacrisis emphasizes time: a neverending end. It questions how to confront crises such as the hot wars in Ukraine or Gaza, or the warm wars across the global south, the rise of right-wing populism worldwide, the impending environmental catastrophe, and the growing social disparities globally. None of these crises can be separated from the current ascent of technocracy or the exploitative nature of digital capitalism.

In October 1994, the inaugural MetaForum significantly impacted media art, activism and discourse within Hungary, across East-Central Europe and points further West. Organized by the Media Research Foundation in cooperation with the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, it was conceived of and realized by Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, and János Sugár. This series of three yearly conferences transformed the scope of media art events and gained a special notoriety. It sparked vital discussions and collaborations, blending media criticism, tactical media, and cultural exchanges between East and West. As the 30th anniversary draws near, we are excited to announce MetaForumX, set for October 2024. This edition promises to tackle the critical issues of our era, focusing on the deep influence of digital technology on art, culture, and societal frameworks.

Over three days, MetaForumX will merge presentation formats and topics featuring younger voices that are engaged with current issues and reconnecting with original participants from the series with in-depth lectures, discussions and screenings. The urgent concerns of young people bridging generational knowledge and fostering ongoing dialogue for a sustainable and inclusive future.

Day 0, 24 October 2024

18:00 Finissage at T+U’s exhibition at Trafó Gallery. Guided tour by Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Márió Nemes Z.

Day 1, 25 October 2024 – ‘Conference Day’ at Trafó

09:30-10:00 Registration

10:10-10:30 Welcome and Introduction by Flóra Barkóczi

10:30 – 12:00 Session 1: Sources of the Permanent Crises (presentations + discussion) moderated by János Sugár

Sanja Sekelj: Reconsidering the Crisis and the Art System: Structures and Narratives of and about CEE Cultural Actors in the 1990s and Early 2000s from a CEE Perspective
This contribution aims to offer a historical and spatially determined account of the structure of the global art system between 1991 and 2006, and of the position of Central-East European (CEE) cultural actors within it. Network analysis is conducted on the dataset constructed based on art criticism published in Croatia, resulting in collaborative and co-occurrence networks of artists and art institutions. Apart from offering a broader insight into their structural positions, the contribution delves deeper into specific relations of CEE cultural actors, to discern nuanced narratives that followed their participation in exhibition activities. Despite showing efforts of individual actors to reshape relations within the art system, the constructed dataset primarily offers the possibility of a better understanding of its underlying structures, and their durability, thus facilitating a shift from perceiving crisis as an isolated event to understanding it as intrinsic context.

Dušan Barok: Artist Organising and Para-Institutional Practices in the Semiperiphery
While platforms have become a dominant contemporary mode of value extraction and exploitation, they have also proliferated as a mode of social organization, alliance-building and public action. Bridging people and services, onsite and online, acting and archiving, they provide a flexible topology for collective agency. In this contribution, I will situate and compare several artist-run foundations and societies that were active in the region alongside the Media Research Foundation in the 1990s, and try to draw parallels and contrasts with artists organizing around platforms today.

Ágnes Básthy: Crisis of What? – Taking a Suspicious Walk around our Fashionable Notions
This presentation is an invitation for a collective thought walking around our useful and less useful but often used notions and concepts. I would like to present how fixation on crisis-based and fearful thinking is dispossessing or at least distancing us from the core questions of what we think about chaos and order, what we think about power and who and how exerts it in our world today. How can we reclaim our power and hereupon our autonomy? What are the consequences that the notion of crisis being appropriated and incorporated into managerialism and governmentality? How is this shaping our experiences, attitudes and thinking about the recent constellation of technology, capitalism, power and consequently our future? What kind of roles do our frequently used notions have in this all? Take an imaginary walk with me in the company of some of the most important contemporary thinkers.

12:00-13:00 Lunch Break at Trafó’s Café

13:00 – 15:00 Session 2: From the Representation of Crises to the Crisis of Representation (presentations + discussion) moderated by Geert Lovink

Vanda Sárai: Virtual Bodies, Virtual Threats? On Online Violence and Real-Life Anxieties
In my presentation, Virtual bodies, virtual threats? On online violence and real-life anxieties, I’d like to reflect on the ever gloomier nature of social media presence and its offline consequences, taking into consideration the content creators and the behavior of their audiences, as well. As a starting point, I’ll elaborate on Amalia Ulman’s Instagram performance, Excellences and Perfections (2014): the work – which can also be described as a hoax – reflected on the twisted ways of how femininity is presented and commented on online, and while monitoring the audience’s reactions, Ulman also painted a not so flattering picture of the double standards users (but especially women) face in social media every day. Even though the performance can be regarded as ancient if we consider the speed digital culture is transforming, its main sources of inspiration remain distressingly valid: putting ourselves out there, building our personal brand and – in general – being extremely online are all necessary elements of the hustle to make it, while the mental burden of dealing with trolls and real or virtual threats are all deemed to be integral parts of the job. To use Lauren Berlant’s term, our whole social media presence is permeated by cruel optimism. By drawing on some recent examples of pop culture, digital culture and Hungarian public discourse, I’d like to shed light on the inherent anomalies of our online presence, showcase some menacing trends arising with new technologies and pose the question of responsibility when it comes to forecasting and preventing real-life dangers.

Szilvi Német: Military Influencers in Peace Camp Hungary™. LARPing the War – But Standing Out of It
Political action today is often compared to cosplay, a form of costumed roleplay where participants don disguises to create the illusion of taking action, all while no longer believing in the possibility of effecting real change. In my presentation, I apply the term “LARPing” to the strategies of the Hungarian Defense Ministry, which has recently emerged as a major producer of military-themed entertainment in a country that fashions itself as an island of peace. Fidesz won the elections by pledging that no troops or arms will be sent to Ukraine, still the character of the soldier is being hyped up in an endless stream of #miltok influencer videos to military endorsed reality tv. While avoiding involvement in the most pressing regional conflict, these productions invite everyday citizens and celebrities to participate in a low-stakes media spectacle, where they act out military scenarios on training grounds in pristine outfits.

Constant Dullaart: Open-Sourced Iconoclasm
In an era marked by post-truth narratives and a pervasive sense of iconoclasm, artist Constant Dullaart explores the critical role of open-source AI in reshaping our cultural landscape. As photography—once a trusted medium for capturing reality—loses its credibility due to deepfakes and manipulated images. Dullaart argues that open-source AI serves as a counterbalance to the escalating commodification of information, offering a framework for collaborative artistic practice that prioritizes accessibility and ethical engagement.

Charlotte Eifler: Utopia Feeds Machines – On Alternate Worldings
This contribution is about practices of creating and imagining alternate worldings. Based on Eifler’s works Feminism is Browser, Pattern Thieves, Archival Grid and Eyes in Flux it will take us into queer, community based Sci Fi narratives. Moving from the grid as a cultural technique and an interaction between imaging technologies and mathematical, topographical, geographical, and governmental knowledge, you will encounter corporeal approaches to digital archives and magical quantum leaps in European museum landscapes.

15:00 – 15:30 Coffee Break

15:30 – 17:00 Session 3: Technopolitics of Planetary Computation and Beyond (presentations + discussion) moderated by Zsolt Miklósvölgyi

Boldizsár Hordós: Naked Logic: Black Boxes and Eternal Computation
This presentation is a brief introduction to non-symbolic computational design. With the advance of information technology computer systems evolved from analogue ballistic calculators and noisy, room-sized machines to an almost ethereal network of digital devices, a complex tissue of distributed hardware and increasingly monopolistic software. This evolution is rooted in a strictly goal-oriented approach to craft an algorithm, as a mirror image or transmutation of the universal laws that ordain the behavior of things within the world. By separating elemental functions from their informational context, embodied computation offers an alternative path. It serves as a flexible, inventive toolkit for object design, engineering and architecture. It could also make media art less boring.

András Cséfalvay: Re-Imagined Space Exploration – Evolutionary History of the Call to Fly, Rise Above. Geopolitics of Extinction Angst and New Cosmologies
RISE is an initiative and at the same time an artistic project aimed at including non-dominant stakeholders in shaping humanity’s future as an interplanetary species. In contrast to the colonial narratives of dominant Eastern and Western powers, RISE advocates for space exploration as a collaborative, cultural effort. It reflects on the influence of Eastern European conceptual art, science fiction, and the evolution of flight on these ideas, while raising the question: Do we all possess an ancestral pre-dry-land memory that drives us to rise above the surface? Ultimately, the goal is to develop an applied mythology—stories that inspire new technologies and avoid the pitfalls of space colonization.

Juli Laczkó: All Computers are Broken. Rethinking the Technosphere Along the Lines of Repair and Maintenance Work
Broken world thinking suggests that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practiced and thought about should be the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today. According to Jackson’s Rethinking Repair, breakdown, maintenance, and repair constitute crucial but vastly understudied sites or moments within the worlds of new media and technology today. Repair is a side or moment of technological life that goes for the most part unrecognized. Thinking through the life of technological objects in terms of repair labor informs us about new media in uncharted or unchartable ways. What are the social determinations enacted through the life of technological objects, and how can we unravel them?
Following up on Jackson’s broken world theory, I propose that the understanding of the work rendered invisible under our normal modes of picturing and theorizing technology cannot be described by the usual methodologies of those same theories. Instead, it’s Anna Tsing’s feminist anthropology that may provide a more porous and fluid model to understand relations of repair and maintenance work. In the Mushroom at the End of the World, On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Tsing proposes a methodology of research that is informed by the life cycles of matsutake mushrooms. She disregards established dictionaries and methods of research in favor of centering temporality, assemblages, and the art of noticing. My latest work, ‘Where we’re at’, aims to be informed by Tsing’s methodology, reflecting on the similarities and differences between the global e-waste crisis and a specific local tradition of precarious survival in Eastern Europe. I claim that informal and temporal scavenging is specialist skilled labor that sustains not only those who perform it, but also the power structures that they are subjected to.

18:00 – 19:30 Screening and discussion event at MKE Intermedia Department

Including Q&A with Oleksiy Radynski (connected via Zoom from Kyiv) about Where Russia Ends, 25 mins (dir. Oleksiy Radynski). More info: https://www.sheffdocfest.com/film/where-russia-ends. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMoPtP_5EBk

Day 2: October 26, 2024 – ‘Forum Day’ at Trafó

10:00 – 11:30 Session 4: Beyond the Institutional System – Cultural Work in the Era of PermaCrisis

Sepp Eckenhaussen: Art in Permacrisis: Organizing Art Workers in the World Beyond Art
This contribution explores the desire for economically sustainable art circulation. Can we imagine a sustainable art economy beyond precarity? How would this change the circulation of art works, the curriculum of art and design academies, the exhibition programs of museums, and the organization of collectives and unions?
In the context of the permacrisis, this feels like a daunting, if not futile issue to take on. Surely, the economy of the arts is notoriously unsustainable. But aren’t there many undeniably more relevant crises? However, permacrisis and the arts are deeply connected, already by the inescapable shadow of more urgent matters cast on the question of a ‘fair’ art economy. The precarious social legitimacy of art puts it at the mercy of crisis management, which in turn leads to the instrumentalization of art in fighting other crises.
Let’s unpack this complex relation between art and permacrisis layer by layer, and see where it leaves us. Should we maybe, once again, declare the end of art – this time, not as a fulfillment of the dialectics of history, but as a minor casualty to the permacrisis? Should we continue to try and prove the ‘real’ value of art as an important part of national identities, an essential part of Bildung, a comforting refuge, or a catalyst of critical reflection? Or should we fully embrace creative industries politics, which proposes art and culture as a profitable and ‘impactful’ endeavor for the ‘social good’. In this narrative, after all, art finds economic leverage by acting as a crisis solver. The larger the crisis, the more we need art?

This presentation is followed by a discussion, moderated by Zsolt Miklósvölgyi. With Sepp Eckenhaussen from INC, Amsterdam, Sanneke Huisman from LI-MA, Amsterdam, Tjaša Pogačar from ŠUM, Ljubljana (via Zoom) and Róna Kopeczky from Easttopics & Secondary Archive, Budapest.

11:30 – 12:30 Session 5: Red Forest (Mijke van der Drift, David Muñoz Alcántara & Diana McCarty) – in conversation with Szabolcs Kisspál

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 – 15:00 Session 6: Aims and Relevance of MetaForum – Then (1994-1996) and Now

Round Table with Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, János Sugár, moderated by Flóra Barkóczi

15:00 – 15:30 Coffee break

15:30 – 16:30 Session 7: Stream Art Network discussion

With Roman Dziadkiewicz of UKRAiNATV (Krakow), Gytis Dovydaitis and Adomas of 3022 (Vilnius) and students of the Budapest Intermedia Dept. about the newly founded Stream Art Network, moderated by Geert Lovink

16:30 – 17:30 Final discussion about contemporary arts, the digital condition and the perma crisis, in Hungary, the region, Europe and beyond

18:00 onwards: closing event at MKE Intermedia Department

Stream Art Network LIVE with UKRAiNATV web streaming network, with onsite and remote contributions from Krakow, Kyiv and elsewhere, including a conversation between Szabolcs Kisspál and Geert Lovink & sound performance of Dániel Kophelyi and Ádám Jeneses

Venues and Information

Conference program at Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Liliom u. 41). Evening programs at MKE – Hungarian University of Fine Arts – Intermedia Department (Kmety György u. 27). Please write for more information to <metaforumx@proton.me>. The event is free to enter.

Biographies

Flóra Barkóczi
Flóra Barkóczi is an art historian working at the Central European Research Institute for Art History – Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary. From 2018 to 2022, she worked at the Artpool Art Research Center. Since 2020, she has been a PhD fellow in the Film, Media, and Cultural Theory Doctoral Program at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research focuses on the role of technological mediums in post-1960s avant-garde art in the East-Central European region, with an emphasis on conceptual photography from the 1960s and 70s, (new) media art from the 1980s and 90s, Internet-based art practices, 1990s Internet culture, and contemporary photo-based art practices. Since 2024 she has been a lecturer at the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

Dušan Barok
Dušan Barok’s work is concerned with digital culture, memory and activism. He is founding editor of Monoskop, a wiki for arts and studies. Recently, together with Ivana Rumanová, he organized the exhibition programme *We Have Never Been Closer* at tranzit.sk in Bratislava, presenting contemporary artistic responses to the transformation period of the 1990s in Central Europe; was part of the curatorial team and contributed an essay to the catalogue of the touring exhibition *Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s*, organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and prepared a “Monoskop” exhibition for Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt, entitled *Read Write Run*, dealing with the themes of community servers, shadow libraries, permacomputing and cyberfeminism.

Ágnes Básthy
Ágnes Básthy is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral School of Sociology at Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary and a lecturer at Rajk László College for Advanced Studies Budapest, Hungary where she teaches social theory and biopolitics. Her doctoral research focuses on the transformation of the art field in Hungary after the regime change, analyzing the relationship between art, politics and social changes in a global context focusing on Eastern Europe. She has been working at the intersection of culture, sociology, and art for more than a decade as a researcher, critic, and organizer. As an independent publicist, she follows an interdisciplinary approach to interpreting contemporary art production in the context of recent cultural and social phenomena and tendencies.

András Cséfalvay
Visual artist, digital storyteller, musician and mytho-poet from Bratislava, and an Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Co-Founder of the Digital Arts Platform. After studying painting and mathematics, he wrote his dissertation on the usefulness and reality of fiction. His interest is imbalances in the relationship between culture and technology, and political and ethical aspects of listening to nondominant voices in world interpretation.

Mijke van der Drift
Philosopher, performer and educator Mijke van der Drift works on ethics as a focal point in a multi-disciplinary research about social transformation. Van der Drift is a Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Mijke’ writing has appeared in Social Text, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, with Cambridge University Press, Routledge and many other outlets. Mijke van der Drift and Nat Raha co-authored Trans Femme Futures which comes out in November 2024 with Pluto Press. Van der Drift lives and works in London.

Constant Dullaart
Constant Dullaart lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Exploring how social and cultural values reverberate in tools and technology, Dullaart creates works to emphasize an enjoyable friction between old and new, manual and automated, online and offline, real or not. He deconstructs and analyzes the specific human circumstances under which technological instruments are created, and how this influences the way the instruments are consequently used. Dullaart investigates these processes through creating his own ‘artisanal’ social media platform common.garden. Revisiting his research into neural networks, he probes how phenomena like glossolalia and apophenia can create a bridge between person and technology. Dullaart is a professor of Networked Materialities at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg.

Sepp Eckenhaussen
Sepp Eckenhaussen is an arts researcher and organizer based in Amsterdam. He works at the Institute of Network Cultures and the St. Joost Academy of Art & Design. From 2020 until 2023, he co-directed the art workers organization Platform BK.

Charlotte Eifler
Charlotte Eifler is an artist and filmmaker who explores the politics of representation in relation to technology. Her works in the fields of moving image, extended reality, installation and performance address the intersections of digitality, queerness, archival practices and speculative futures. Eifler’s projects utilize experimental storytelling techniques to question existing power structures and imagine alternative forms of history production and social coexistence. A special focus is placed on the gaps within digital representation mechanisms, the material infrastructures of the internet, and the intertwined history of military, science, and art. Charlotte is a member of the networks unlearning canon _ intersectional teaching in Art & Design, Digital Critique, feat.fem, FACES – gender, art, technology und G-Edit. Charlotte Eifler has presented her works at various international venues, including the ACM Siggraph Art in Los Angeles, the Sapporo International Art Festival in Japan, Le Printemps de Toulouse France, IMPAKT Utrecht, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Art Basel, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Her works have also been featured in numerous international screenings. Residencies and scholarships have enabled her international research in Moscow, New York, Ghent, Mexico City and Paris among others.

Boldizsár Hordós
Born in 1991, Boldizsár Hordós earned his master’s degree from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2016. He is currently a PhD student at the same institution and teaches computer history in the Intermedia Department.

Sanneke Huisman
Sanneke Huisman is an art historian, writer and curator with a focus on media art. She has been working as a freelance curator at LI-MA since 2013. Together with Marga van Mechelen, she is co-editor and author of A Critical History of Media Art in the Netherlands: Platforms, Policies, Technologies (Jap Sam Books, 2019). Recent exhibitions she has curated include Ekstasis. A Universe of Light and Sound (Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, 2023), REBOOT. Pioneering Digital Art (LI-MA and Nieuwe Instituut, 2023) and Two Songs (Netherlands Pavilion, 15th Gwangju Biennale, 2024). Sanneke writes on contemporary art for magazines and museums, including Metropolis M and Centraal Museum Utrecht, and is a guest lecturer at various Dutch art academies and universities. She also works as an advisor for Cultuurloket DigitALL.

Ádám Jeneses
Ádám Jeneses, a.k.a. eden_jeneses is an artist and curator from Budapest. His primary focus is on sound art, performance, and site-specific installations. His fusion of sonic pieces inspired by noise and danger-music, olfactory interventions, and installations of found objects, explores the infrapolitics of overstimulating consumerism and authoritarianism. He is a co-founder of the experimental music duo with Daniel Varga, and the music group “2006” with 224 and Omon Wynfryth. He is currently pursuing a DLA degree at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

Szabolcs Kisspál
His main field of interest is the intersection of new media, visual arts and social issues. He taught and held workshops and master classes in 11 countries (England, Austria, Czech Republic, United States, Estonia, Finland, France, Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Romania). and he is currently an associate professor and head of the Intermedia Department at the HUFA Budapest. Works presented among others at the Venice Biennial, ISCP and Apexart New York, Stedelijk Museum, Seoul International Media Art Biennale, and further Hungarian and international festivals and various cultural venues. His works can be found in the collections of Ludwig Museum Budapest, Museum of National Contemporary Art Bucharest, Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław, Ostrobothnian Museum Vaasa, Kadist Art foundation – Paris, etc. Between 2012-15 he has been actively involved in various activist projects.

Róna Kopeczky
Róna Kopeczky is a curator and art historian based in Budapest. Between 2006 and 2015 she was a curator at the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, where she focused on site- and situation-specific art practices of young and middle-generation artists from the Central and Eastern European region. Since 2015, she acts as the artistic director of acb Gallery in Budapest, and is an active contributor to the research programs and publications of Acb ResearchLab. She worked on the implementation of the first OFF-Biennále Budapest (2015) and joined the curatorial team of its second edition (2017). She is the co-founder and co-leader of the Easttopics platform, dedicated to representing the Central and Eastern European contemporary art scene. She was the curator of the 18th Tallinn Print Triennial, which ran in 2022 with a Central-Eastern European focus, takes care of the Hungarian contributions to the Secondary Archive platform since 2020, and has been advisory curator for Central and Eastern Europe at Donumenta Regensburg public art program since 2022. She was the curator of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. She received her PhD from the Sorbonne University in 2013.

Juli Laczkó
Juli Laczkó is an intermedia artist engaged with critical research in visual arts and digital culture. She holds a practice-based doctoral degree from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts for her research on visual art and hacker culture. A monograph based on her doctoral dissertation titled The Art of Hacking: Strategic Interactions between Hacker Culture and Visual Arts was published in 2021. Her practice is informed by critical making, social divides, anti-patriarchal, feminist and post-Anthropocentric perspectives, articulating intermediality in space. Works of her hybrid practice of the material and the digital appeared internationally from Leipzig, Vienna, Budapest, Zagreb, Bratislava to Istanbul and the Nevada Desert in collective- and solo exhibitions. She lives in Amsterdam and teaches at the Image and Media Technology program at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht.

Áron Lődi
Áron Lődi is a visual artist and cultural organizer based in The Hague. His practice deals with the horrors of capitalism and the lingering shadows of imperialism through the lens of Europe’s east-west ideological divide. His work often focuses on Eastern Europe’s depiction as a construct lacking social and political transparency that is used to legitimize its “civilizing” through imperial soft power. He holds an MFA degree from the Dirty Art Department at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. He is a founding member of the U&K Magazine publishing project and one-half of the artist duo Alagya. In 2022, He initiated a para-academic programme in Amsterdam, titled Contaminating The Soil That Nurtures Greed. His works have been shown at Semester9, Amsterdam (NL), Jedna Dva Tri Gallery, Prague (CZ), A Promise of Kneropy, Bratislava (SK), Vunu Gallery, Kosice (SK), Ultrastudio Gallery, Pescara (IT), and 1111 Gallery, Budapest (HU). In 2023, he was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.

Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and activist. His recent books: Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019), Stuck on the Platform (2022) and Extinction Internet (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). In 2022 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), art history department.

Diana McCarty
Feminist media activist Diana McCarty is a founding editor of reboot.fm, the award winning free artists’ radio in Berlin. She is a co-founder of the radio networks radia.fm and 24/3 FM Berlin; of the FACES (faces-I) online community for women; and of the elsewhere association. As a cyberpunk in the 1990s, she was active in independent internet culture with net.art, nettime, the MetaForum Conference Series, and different hacking spaces. Her work revolves around art, gender, politics, technology, media and radical feminism. She was a 2019-2020 BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht and a KONE Research Fellow in 2021 and in 2023-25. She shares a Professorship for Time Based Media and Performance at the HfG Karlsruhe with Filipa César. McCarty is a proud Chicana from Albuquerque. She lives and works in Berlin.

Zsolt Miklósvölgyi
Zsolt Miklósvölgyi is an editor and art writer based in Budapest, Hungary. He currently works as a curator at acb Gallery in Budapest. He is the co-founder of the Berlin-Budapest-based art collective and publishing project Technologie und das Unheimliche (T+U) He holds a Ph.D. in literary and cultural studies. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany; and at the Wirth Institute of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. In 2021, he was participating in the artist-in-residence program of Meetfactory Prague. In 2020, he was a literary fellow of the Visegrad Fund in Prague. Together with the T+U collective, he recently participated in a solo show at the Július Koller Society in Bratislava (2022), as well as in a group show at the ISKRA DELTA: The 34th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2021).

David Muñoz-Alcántara
David Muñoz-Alcántara’s work intersects art, architecture, social sciences, and philosophy merged in collective constructions of autonomy. They focus on the revolutionary poetics of art grounded in people’s liberation struggles. Their work addresses the recovery of eco-social dignity with praxes of insurgent communalisms, fugitive power, transformative justice, and Indigenous futurity in defense of life. They are Guest Professor at the Media Faculty of Karlsruhe University of the Arts and Design (2024); Post-Doctoral researcher at the Social Sciences Faculty of Helsinki University (2023-2025); Research Fellow at BAK-Basis voor Actuele Kunst Utrecht (2019-2020); Visiting Researcher at Goldsmiths University of London (2016-2017); Doctor of Arts from Aalto University; and Architect from the National Autonomous University of México.

Szilvi Német
Szilvi Német is a journalist and media researcher. Since 2022, she has been working for Lakmusz.hu, a fact-checking and anti-disinformation site, where her focus is on gray zone media, coordinated inauthentic behavior, and influencer politics. Prior to this, she worked as an independent curator and as the director of the Crosstalk video and media art festival. Since 2019, she has been pursuing a PhD in the Film, Media, and Cultural Theory program at ELTE.Her research focuses on online political subcultures, the relationship between popular culture and politics, and network analysis. She co-authored the book ‘Toxic Technocultures and Digital Politics: Emotions, Memes, Data Politics, and Attention on the Internet’ (Napvilág, 2021).

Tjaša Pogačar
Tjaša Pogačar, based between Ljubljana and Prague, is an independent curator of contemporary art and co-founder and editor-in-chief of ŠUM. She draws from gaming, literary fiction and theory to rethink exhibition-making as a collective worlding exercise, prototyping scenarios for a different reality than the socially, politically, and ecologically precarious one we have inherited. She worked as a curator of visual and new media art at Projekt Atol Institute (2021/24) and as a guest curator at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2022/23). She curated shows for SUMO Prague, 2023; viennacontemporary, 2022; 34th Ljubljana Biennale, 2021; International Festival of Computer Arts Maribor, 2019–20; Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2019, 2015; Aksioma and Škuc Gallery among others. Her writing on art has appeared in e-flux Art & Education, Tipping point, ETC magazine, Likovne Besede, Fotograf magazine, Polansky gallery and Karlin Studios Prague, and in publications of institutions such as L’Internationale/Valiz, Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art Ljubljana, P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum, and Kunsthalle Bratislava. She is currently pursuing a PhD at Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Oleksiy Radynski
Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films experiment with documentary forms and practices of political cinema. They have been screened at film festivals and in exhibition contexts worldwide, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), Docudays (Kyiv), Sheffield Doc Fest, Krakow IFF, DOK Leipzig etc. His film Chornobyl 22 won the Grand Prix at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.

Red Forest
RED FOREST is a research constellation activated by Oleksiy Radynski, David Muñoz-Alcántara, Diana McCarty and Mijke van der Drift. The name emerged during a research visit to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Station in spring 2021. The reaction of the forest to Chornobyl’s eco-disaster turned green trees red and the living to not-dead. Mindful of the response of the environment at a variety of scales, including the atomic, Red Forest alludes to this entanglement and resilience, reminding us of the responsibility to face the layers of life in our surroundings, whatever the circumstances. The constellation of Red Forest is not confined to a single discipline, but their work spans media theory, philosophy, anti-colonial praxis, queer theory, feminism, and contemporary critical theory, and their shared practices comprise architecture, radio, film, and performance. Red Forest work contributes to advancing the collective growth of eco-social dignity, recovery of insurgent-indigenous bonds and trans-futurisms. Red Forest convokes the radiation of resistance after the resistance to radiation.

Sanja Sekelj
Sanja Sekelj is a Research Associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. Her research focuses on the art production of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, with a specialization in the research of international cultural relations in the late socialist period, as well as of the cultural dynamics and networking practices at the turn of the millennium.

Vanda Sárai
Vanda Sárai is a Budapest-based independent curator, art writer and researcher. She completed her BA and MA studies in Budapest and Jena, and is currently working on her PhD at Eötvös Loránd University, focusing on the effects of attention economy and digital culture on contemporary art and its institutional system. She is a guest lecturer at the Art and Design Department of Metropolitan University Budapest. She was a member of the curatorial collective, Teleport Gallery (2016-2018). As a curator, she won the Esterházy Art Dating Prize and the MODEM Prize for Young Curators. Her most notable shows were: Time of Our Lives (co-curated with Tamás Don and Ferenc Margl), MODEM (2018); #IFeelSeen, MODEM (2021); WHAT THE RUG? Carpets in Hungarian contemporary art, 1111 (2023); I’m Afraid I Can Do That, TORULA (2023); Kádár Emese: NOT_FOUND, The Space Gallery (2024). Between 2017-2021, she worked in the editorial team of the Hungarian art magazine, Műértő. In 2022-2023, she was the gallery manager of the non-profit art space, 1111. She is a member of AICA Hungary.

János Sugár
János Sugár studied sculpting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Parallel with his studies, between 1980 and 1986 he was actively involved in the exhibitions and performances of Indigo, an interdisciplinary art group led by Miklós Erdély. Sugár has participated in national and international exhibitions since the mid 80s and his work includes installations, performances, film/video, as well as theoretical writing. In 1992 he exhibited at the documenta IX, Kassel, in 1996 Manifesta I, Rotterdam. He completed an Artslink residency at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994, and in 1997/98 a four-month, and in 1999 a three-month fellowship at Experimental Intermedia in New York. His films were screened in 1998 at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. In 1990 he founded with Miklós Peternák the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest and he has been teaching art and media theory there since 1990. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 he organized the MetaForum Conference Series with Geert Lovink and Diana McCarty. He resides in Budapest.