On 25 February, Kino Šiška in Ljubljana hosted the opening conference of tactics&practice, Aksioma’s annual transdisciplinary programme dedicated to contemporary investigative art, society and new technologies. Entitled Are You A Software Update?, this 16th edition, curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša and Neja Berger, questions how software structures our sociality, what types of information are abstracted by the interface and how to navigate through the highly alien and unreadable world of computer code.
The event was kicked off by the theoretical video essay Call me when you get there. Act I: Data Haunted by Magritte’s Ghost by Donatella Della Ratta and Alessandro Turchioe, which raises the question of what constitutes an original and what role creativity plays in a world overrun by artificial intelligence models.
The main focus of the work is the semiotical collapse of the image — what makes a representation a representation and what an object real? If even the human testers have difficulty with simple depictions such as clothing and reflections what does that tell us about the reliability of emerging new technology? The arrival of artificial intelligence in the public sphere triggered familiar anxieties—those same recurring fears that, as McLuhan observed, have accompanied every major technological shift throughout history. Each new invention involves the externalization of a part of ourselves: the telegraph extended our nervous system into machines, while satellite technology brought us closer to displacing our own consciousness. Yet with every extension, there’s a psychic cost. These technologies leave behind unintended consequences etched into the human psyche. In the case of the telegraph, it was the capacity for instant communication—and, more profoundly, the unavoidable exposure to the pain and suffering of others [1]. With the popularisation of image generating AI we were attacked on the terms of our own creativity. This also raises an interesting question about Benjamin’s concept of aura [2] – each AI artwork is namely at the same time just the result of statistical analysis of the stolen training data but somehow completely original to the prompt, and can be rarely reproduced even if the prompt is exactly the same, as the models themselves are transformed by every prompt, feedback and new piece of training data.
The atmosphere in the room was now warm and ready for the next input: the drama spe/k/tacle lecture–performance She’s Evil, Most Definitely Subliminal by Noura Tafeche and Alex Quicho, on how cuteness in the contemporary media space functions not only as an aesthetic preference, but as an imperative – a way of being that goes beyond mere visual attachment and into the realm of power, subjectivity and capitalist production. From the global circulation of kawaii aesthetics to the obsessive subcultures of otaku consumerism, the logic of cuteness permeates identity formation and dictates how subjects are socialised into an effective economy of consumption, desire and control. The rise of the archetype of the Girl exemplifies this very process: a subjectivity disciplined by self-commodification, hyper-legitimacy and aestheticized obedience [3]. But cuteness is far from innocent. It hides an insidious potential that aestheticizes violence, presents asymmetries of power as acceptable, and enables the soft dissemination of capitalist norms through a globalized culture industry. The paradox of cuteness lies in its capacity to disarm and discipline at the same time, to arouse concern while demanding submission.
Quicho’s Girl differs drastically from the one Tiqqun describes. It breaks away from the tightly woven lines of a dispositive and rearranges them anew, knitting a productive and emancipatory new way of being. The Girl is not just a puppet of capital – she exceeds it. She is the unpredictable element that scrambles rational systems, turning consumption, beauty, and attention into forces beyond the capitalist’s intent, weaponizing them for her own means. She is a fallen angel that disrupts, rather than mediates, constantly switching between readability and unreadability. The Girl is deeply familiar with the power of appearance, so she uses it to deflect, redirect and reprogramme, shapeshifting through different discourses, communities and internets. Quicho still defines the girl as an ageless, genderless subject but emphasizes her allegiance to the nonhuman – the Girl is a manifestation of the love between human and machine, she is an interface, a processor that guides the system in silence. The Girl is the embodiment of speculation filling the void of the political left, speculative as in arriving from the future. She is a formalised entity, building and managing her own stacks, striving for planetary computation in her very own way [4]. Finally the Girl is intelligent, not in her originality but in her ability to concentrate and aggregate the combined knowledge of the web, joining together all the tactics of girl-bloggers [5] and amplifying them on a larger scale. As Jess Henderson writes: Every complicity known. Every contradiction understood. Girlbrain is aware of her entanglements to the depths of hell [6].
Tafeche’s concept of Kawayoku, on the other hand, combines the Japanese words kawaii (translated as cute) and bōryoku (translated as violence) to explore how cuteness softens and aestheticizes violence in contemporary online culture. Cuteness, especially online and through social media, masks the harsh reality of violence and presents it as harmless or even attractive at times, reducing its emotional weight and contributing to the normalization of atrocious acts and everyday cruelty. Military organisations on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram use cute aesthetics to propagandise their own armies or operations, normalising militarism and bringing it closer to young people. As an example, the author cites the Israeli army’s media strategy, which uses social networks to manipulate public opinion in the genocide against the Palestinians using sexualised content such as influencers posing in swimsuits cowered with the Star of David and wearing an IOF helmet or combining cute aesthetics with elements such as cat ears or various video game costumes, they manage to divert attention from the brutality of the military operation and mobilise emotions for the purpose of attachment, admiration and attraction. As a result, the discourse around genocide in Gaza, or any other war, oppression or violence by a state or an individual, can change completely if we run it through an aesthetic device or cuteness plug in [7].
Cuteness can be understood as a highly semantically charged and internally antithetical concept. It operates in a series of contradictions; affection is at once gentle yet covertly aggressive, it is both infantile yet highly sexualised, its surface is soft and smooth yet sharp and jagged [8]. Thus, a loving embrace, if too tight, can also be suffocating. If we take, for example, the online trend in which young women are adopting a prey aesthetic and imitating animals such as bunnies, foxes and lambs, we can quickly see the interplay between cuteness and subversion. This phenomenon is characterised by the use of social media filters and poses that emphasise features such as big eyes and soft expressions, creating a vulnerable and innocent look. Tactical passivity is a strategy in which individuals present themselves as submissive or docile in order to achieve certain goals. By embodying prey animals, these individuals navigate complex social dynamics and potentially undermine traditional power structures [9].
Both cuteness and the Girl can only reach their true potential once they are plugged into the database. The Japanese cultural critic and philosopher Hiroki Azuma explains this process with how the otaku deals with isolated moé elements, such as specific character traits (e.g. cat ears, glasses or a shy personality), rather than a linear or unified narrative. These elements exist independently of the stories from which they originate, and otaku can glean them from a large database of available symbols that can be recombined in countless variations, with the original context irrelevant [10]. Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, in their analysis of one of the most powerful online cultural vectors – cuteness, go on to argue that moé is an imperfect cyber-positive process that tends to grow in intensity. Individual moé elements can be added on top of each other and can act as multipliers – the more bells and cat ears, the more relatable and emotionally evocative the fictional image will be [11]. The moé elements do not require the otaku to be included in the original narrative – the traits themselves are conceived of separately. A fan can fall in love with a character for a particular trait without needing to understand the larger story or context in which the character exists. This decontextualisation of characters is another central idea in understanding how cultural database reproduction works. Azuma draws on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra to explain how moé characters are no longer bound to reality or deep narrative meaning. Instead, they are fragments that exist in a cycle of constant change and recombination [12].
This was best displayed at Tafeche’s solo exhibition Annihilation Core, Inherited Lore ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶ which opened the previous day at the Aksioma | Project Space. In one part of the gallery, visitors could watch the video essay The Kawayoku Inception, a combination of online images, memes, screenshots, Tiktok videos, screen recordings, comment sections, threads and other media that are tied together with a lecture on what strategies are employed in the process of inscribing violent practices into a certain aesthetic. In another part of the exhibition space, inside the cozy world boxed off by the curtains, there was an installation halfway between a gamer battlestation and a drone Ground Control Station (GCS). The desktop, decorated with various anime memorabilia like plushies, posters and figurines, boasted two sets of monitors; the three upper ones showed drone feed, while the two lower ones allowed the viewer access to the entire catalogue of media found by Tafeche over the years. The artist has described her project as archival trauma practice – trauma bonding as a fact, archiving as a coping mechanism.
Noura Tafeche, Annihilation Core Inherited Lore ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶, 24 February–26 March 2025, Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma
The second panel of the conference consisted of three presentations given by Daphne Dragona, Nelly Y. Pinkrah and Dr. Clea Bourne, focusing on how computational mechanisms and algorithmic control shape our understanding of the planet. Dragona’s talk entitled Update Abort: When You Realise That Earth Is Not Just Another System presented different approaches to conceptualising planet Earth as a system – from planet as software, to Earth as a digital model, to Earth as a spaceship we pilot, to Gaia – earth as cybernetic superorganism. Dragona is critical towards viewing the world as a machine, a tool, a computer that we could continue to control, direct and abuse. At the same time, she acknowledges how humanity has become so dependent on technology that a return to a primal state would not be possible nor productive, we cannot undo the pollution we caused. Ecological catastrophe is not something we wait for or expect, it is not some far-off unimaginable event that will happen in the distant future, it is something we are already living through. Disasters are happening all around us all the time, they are not something to prepare for, they are something to react to [13]. The matter of naming or diagnosing the state in which we are currently operating is not trivial, because our response is conditioned by it. What matters is who sets the conditions for the definition of a crisis – who decides what a disaster looks like [14]. That is also why our solution to the impending climate disaster has to be one that includes radical new technologies that try to model, understand and predict our plante’s movements, not detechnologisation [15]. This is where Dragona sees the potential of embracing situatedness involved with working with the land, and attention that is paid to sustainability, materiality, energy and waste in local initiatives and artistic projects.
Pinkrah’s lecture On Words and Worlds illustrates the complex relationship between language, computation, colonial processes, algorithms and control. The author sees language as a fundamental technology that works as a system of relations, mediation of everyday life. The interface as a cultural form deploys computational power into all aspects of human life. Like Foucault’s dispositif, based on its positioning, it is setting elements into relation and context, mediating the human–machine divide [16]. Machinic languages slowly remodeling our own, code constructs like loops, arrays, queues and stacks framing our social time. All most abstract measures of algorithms are concerned with computational time and its management, having no traction without a social framing [17]. Written language is thus a tool that aims to collapse images, and strictly linearize symbols. It helps us organize our memory structures and track the procedural accumulation of knowledge [18]. Pinkrah shows us how naming is the first algorithm of conquest, and language the tool through which early data processing rendered indigenous culture unreadable. At the same time language was the driving factor of the cybernetic system of colonialism, where people were seen as input, where violence was encoded in the system and optimization meant more extraction. Thus the plantation worked much like a database, its logic both natural and logical. The whipping machine creates absolute control, with or without presence, forming a basis for the rise of rhythmic practices and languages. Language, code and computation are hence technologies that are more closely connected than we might think and, at the same time, precede many of the machines we associate them with today.
The last talk of the panel, Terraforming Tales of Software and Us by Dr. Clea Bourne, focused on the invisibility of software, its power, and the idea of terraforming the Earth. Bourne looks at terraforming as an extractive, colonial process that is a result of a lack of political systems that could address global concerns. At the same time, we are unable to visualise how our planet is being terraformed by software – its hidden process having little regard for balance. Rather than focusing on something like planetary computation, where different levels of planetary processes work in sync from extraction to supplying the user [19], or something like the project of terraforming, where we view our planet as something we can freely mold and reshape to our desires, we should focus on practices that cultivate collective agency and intelligence, even if they start off in small communities, given enough time they can scale and grow to facilitate bigger structures that could pose a real alternative [20]. Bourne also stressed the importance of science fiction for our ability to imagine the future. Using science fiction to imagine alternative systems of production or radically different social structures isn’t as implausible as it might initially seem. Throughout history, major social and economic transformations often appear, especially in hindsight, as sudden deviations or unexpected turns [21].
The third part of the conference took place in THE VOID’s hybrid pop-up studio, a streaming infrastructure that joins the methods of experimental television and ambitions of tactical media. This allowed both the audience in the room and those online to follow the content presented by Iva Ramuš Cvetkovič, Lesia Kulchynska and Donatella Della Ratta, all of them equipped with extra references provided live by the TV team. In the first lecture entitled Transformation of War, Fragmentation of Law and Dominance of Technology Iva Ramuš Cvetkovič addressed the inability of modern law to capture the reality of current war interlaced with technology. The young researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana demonstrated how contemporary law is too rigid, stiff and slow to be able to catch up to new developments in technology and consequently the ramifications of this in war strategies. Deleuze explains this hesitation of the law as a struggle to migrate from a disciplinary society to a society of control – from a society where power is held in specific structure to a society where power is exercised through constant surveillance that is tearing down rigid structures on which the law was built and rather adapts to the flow of binary code and new technology [22].
The second guest, Lesia Kulchynska, presented The Lure of War, the first of two live video essays performed live. The work focused on how modern warfare employs new strategies, such as the recruitment infrastructure of the gig economy and modern advertising strategies. Kuchynska describes the popularisation of telegram channels for enrollment in pro–russian groups that conspire against the people of Ukraine and its allies. The tasks assigned to the individuals that accept the gig are mostly vandalism and arson on Ukrainian turf. The business model of the gig economy, perfect for informal labour markets, specifically targeted towards low–wage workers and operating under pervasive surveillance [23] now employs civilist mercenaries that do not fully grasp the implications of the simple tasks they are asked to carry out. The organisation of these communities is also becoming increasingly difficult to track as they start to resemble the structure of the dark forest [24] – choosing invite only, locked corners of the internet to tighten their community and stay undetected. The main point of these attacks is not the damage itself or the spread of fear, but mostly the aggregation of images to create an illusion of collective action, to lure even more people to join and partake in the action of war. Here ideology does not suffice, what takes over is desire. People in fascist regimes were not convinced by the clever rhetorical devices of their charismatic leaders, nor were they fooled by the despicable trickery, but the simultaneous action of specific material and social conditions led them to see violence and repression as attractive, images and symbols only feeding this desire [25]. As technology evolves so does both material and psychological warfare, only gaining more power from its inseparable counterpart of the economy.
Ask Me for Those Unborn Promises That May Seem Unlikely to Happen in the Natural by Donatella Della Ratta was the second live video essay as well as the closing event of the conference. In her presentation Della Ratta focused on the power of image and its unfolding – how the future can be shaped and captured by capital for its own ends. This is nested in the story of how in ancient Israel, according to the Old Testament, God mandated that the priests who performed sacrifices at the temple maintain ceremonial purity. This purification process involved water mixed with the ashes of a flawless red heifer, one that was without any imperfections. The red heifers were transported to Israel in 2022, starting the hyperstitious process of fulfilling the prophecy and outlining Israel’s plans to build the third temple on the remains of Gaza. Della Ratta emphasises the power of AI generated images and videos of the occupied West Bank transformed into a luxury resort in the middle of which lies the third temple. Postmodern images function as replacements for real, lived experiences, collapsing the four dimensions into two. Technical images work more synchronistically than they do linearly and require the ability to process broader collections of data [26]. Thus horrific AI images are very capable of shaping a possible future – if capitalist realism prevents us from dreaming up alternatives to capitalism [27] that doesn’t mean it can’t suffocate us with visions of its own.
The intense afternoon at Kino Šiška was finally crowned by the inauguration of the video installation A Whisper, a Murmur, a Roar in the Kamera gallery, a work by Eva Papamargariti that explores the interaction between the natural and artificial qualities of technology. Spanning through a set of monitors we can observe a digital environment that is merging with shots of the real, the everyday. She uses mutating bodies as subjects that bridge the gap between the human, nonhuman and natural. Citing Donna Harraway: “Both inheriting and also reweaving ongoing webs of affective and material relationships are the stakes; such webs are necessary for staying with the trouble. In scholarly circles, ethnographers have understood best that making kin involves all sorts of categories of players – including gods, technologies, critters, expected and unexpected “relatives,” and more – and diverse processes, which taken together make the characterization of “kinship” as relations formed solely by genealogical descent and reproduction, or alliance and lineage, unsustainable” [28].
Eva Papamargariti, A Whisper, a Murmur, a Roar, 25 February–28 March 2025, Kino Šiška, Ljubljana. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma
To conclude the conference we moved to Pritličje in search of algorithmically produced music and the soundscape of cuteness. The afterparty Lookahead compression curated by musician and DJ msn gf tried to tie together contemporary music flows and computer mediated music in its rawest form, first with a live performance by msn gf, then with a live coding session by Prince Lucija. As Maya B. Kronic puts it “Thinking about what’s going on inside and around the sound gives you new ways to listen, and a model to think other cybernetic cultures” [29].
––––––– ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─⋆References⋆─ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ –––––––
[1] M. McLuhan, Understanding media: the extensions of man. (1964).
[2] W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (1935).
[3] Tiqqun, Preliminary materials for a theory of the young-girl, (2012).
[4] A. Quicho, Girl Intelligence, (2025).
[5] E. Frieder, I’m like a pdf but a girl: Girlblogging as nomadic pedagogy (2025).
[6] J. Henderson, Girlbrain: A Theory. (2024) : https://networkcultures.org/longform/2024/03/08/girlbrain/
[7] N. Tafeche, The Kawayoku Tales: Aestheticization of Violence in Military, Gaming, Social Media Cultures and Other Stories, (2024).
[8] A. Ireland, & M. Kronic, Cute Accelerationism, (2024).
[9] A. Quicho, Prey mode: why girls are pretending to be cute animals online, (2023): https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61336/1/going-prey-mode-girls-cute-animals-online-canthal-tilt-tiktok
[10] H. Azuma, Otaku : Japan’s Database Animals, (2009).
[11] A. Ireland, & M. Kronic, Cute Accelerationism, (2024).
[12] H. Azuma, Otaku : Japan’s Database Animals, (2009).
[13] A. Crawford, Sensibility in Ruins, (2024).
[14] B. H. Bratton, Terraforming, (2019).
[15] R. Papamatheakis, Black Natures: Enframing the Natural as Technological. (2019): https://strelkamag.yc.strelka.com/en/article/black-natures-enframing-the-natural-as-technological.
[16] B. Hookway, Interface. (2014).
[17] A. MacKenzie, Cutting Code: Software and Sociality, (2006).
[18] A. Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture & Speech, (2009).
[19] B. H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, (2015).
[20] G. Lovink, Extinction Internet (2022): https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/extinction-internet/.
[21] W. Davies, Economic Science Fictions. (2018).
[22] G. Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, (1992).
[23] N. Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, (2017).
[24] Y. Strickler, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, (2019): https://www.ystrickler.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet/.
[25] G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (1972).
[26] P. Krašovec, Tujost kapitala, (2021).
[27] M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009).
[28] D. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (2016).
[29] M. B. Kronic, 93–97 Rewind, (2021).