This repository is based on the media art and research networking conference MetaForumX - PermaCrises, co-organized by Flóra Barkóczi, Geert Lovink, Áron Lődi, Diana McCarty, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and János Sugár. The event was held from October 25-26, 2024, at Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest and the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.
Introduction
Building on the legacy of the original MetaForum conferences (1994-96), MetaForumX delved into the urgent theme of PermaCrises, reflecting on the persistent breakdown of political, societal, and cultural systems. Situated in East-Central Europe, the event examined how the region’s unique semi-peripheral perspective illuminated global dynamics and challenges, from environmental collapse to rising technocracy and digital capitalism. Marking nearly 30 years since the inaugural MetaForum, this edition reconnected past participants with new voices through lectures, discussions, and screenings, fostering critical dialogues on contemporary crises and their impact on art, culture, and society.
You can read the full introduction here. Download the program booklet here.
In the repository below, you will find descriptions, video recordings, links, and pictures of the entire program.
All recordings were made and edited by students of the Intermedia Department: András Bódai, Anna Rybaltovszki, and Blanka Bodnár.
DAY 1
Session 1: Sources of the permanent crises
From left to right: Ágnes Básthy, Sanja Sekelj, Dušan Barok, and János Sugár (moderator)
Kicking off the program, Sanja presented a mapping of structures and narratives of and about Central-Eastern European cultural actors in the 1990s and early 2000s. After this, Dušan Barok discussed several instances of para-institutional organisation by artists in the semiperiphery. Especially interesting were Monoskop, which was founded by Barok, and the powerful recent culture strike in Slovakia against repression, censorship, and underpayment. Closing the first session was Ágnes Básthy with the lecture ‘Crisis of What? – Taking a Suspicious Walk around our Fashionable Notions’. Básthy’s full text was published on the INC website, and can be found here.
Session 2: From the representation of crises to the crisis of representation
From left to right: Szilvi Német, Constant Dullaart, Vanda Sárai, and Geert Lovink (moderator)
Discussing online violence and real-life anxieties, Vanda Sáral revisited Amalia Ulman’s famous Instagram performance and related it to contemporary hidden camera scandals in Hungary. Next, Constant Dullaart took the stage and played an AI-generated podcast about MetaForumX.
The podcast was a great example Constant’s method of ‘open-sourced iconoclasm’, using AI as a playful artistic tool. A few minutes of podcast were followed by a large range of other examples – from an AI handshake sculpture to a croissanter-than-croissant generated image.
As a final speaker in the session, Szilvi Német presented ‘Military Influencers in Peace Camp Hungary™: LARPing the War – But Standing Out of It’:
Session 3: Technopolitics of planetary computation and beyond
From left to right: Juli Ladzkó, András Cséfalvay, Boldizsár Hordós, and Zsolt Miklósvölgyi (moderator)
The third and final session of the day started with András Cséfalvay’s reflections on space exploration, trying to develop a new cosmology of evolution and the call to fly and rise above. He was followed by Boldizsár Hordós with the lecture ‘Naked Logic: Black Boxes and Eternal Computation’. This full text was published on the INC website and can be found here. Finally, Juli Laczkó presented a call to what we might describe as ‘radical repairism’: fundamentally rethinking computational relations, design, production, repair, and maintenance by centralizing the understanding of the (invisible) natural resource extraction and human labor involved in the global supply chains of hardware production.
Evening program at the Intermedia Department
Finishing the program of the first day, there was a screening of Oleksiy Radynski’s film ‘Where Russia Ends’, followed by a Q&A moderated by Diana McCarty. The film combines found footage recovered from an abandoned Soviet-era film archive in Kiev with a fictional narrative and voice-over. The result is a smart, beautiful, and unsettling image colonial terraforming, in which the Ukranian people are both subjected to and complicit in colonial oppression.
DAY 2
Session 4: Beyond the institutional system – cultural work in the era of permacrisis
From left to right: Róna Kopeczky, Sanneke Huisman, Sepp Eckenhaussen, and Zsolt Miklósvölgyi (moderator). Participating online (on the screen): Tjaša Pogačar
The second conference day started with a lecture by Sepp Eckenhaussen, ‘Art in Permacrisis: Organizing Art Workers in the World Beyond Art’. He argued that in the age of permacrisis, we are increasingly being governed by crisis narratives, which both marginalize and instrumentalize art. However, according to Sepp, we cannot afford to not engage with crisis logic, crisis definition, with critique.
The lecture transitioned into a panel conversation with Sanneke Huisman of the media art archive LIMA (Amsterdam), Tjaša Pogačar of ŠUM (Ljubljana), and Róna Kopeczky of Easttopics and Secondary Archive (Budapest).
Session 5: Red Forest in conversation with Szabolcs Kisspál
The day moved on with a powerfully disruptive conversation between moderator Szabolcs Kisspál and three members of the Red Forest Collective (Mijke van der Drift, David Munos Alcántara & Diana McCarty) on abolition, art as class struggle, and autonomy with the land:
Session 6: Aims and relevance of Metaforum – then (1994-1996) and now
From left to right: Diana McCarty, János Sugár, Geert Lovink, and Flóra Baróczi (moderator)
On a historical (and somewhat nostalgic) note, art historian and co-organizer Flóra Barkóczi presented a compilation of footage from MetaForm I, II, and III, and then had a conversation with the founders of MetaForum – Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, János Sugár.
Session 7: Stream Art Network Discussion
In November 2024, the StreamArtNetwork was officially launched. The idea of the StreamArtNetwork (SAN) emerged together with UKRAiNATV’s weekly live webcasts from the StreamArtStudio in Krakow (PL), in response to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, just after February 24, 2022. Media artists, activists, journalists, AV producers, DJs, and IT freaks from the region and beyond reached out to others to pick up the stream, join, and show solidarity. The aims of the StreamArtNetwork are diverse, radical, and utopian at the same time. The network streams together, mixing and layering, meeting in-between platforms, localities and realities. The network’s founding members are UKRAiNATV (Krakow), The Void/INC (Amsterdam), CDI (Coventry), Re:Frame.TV (Kyiv), 3022 (Vilnius), and Konfluxus (Budapest). At MetaForum, the work of the StreamArtNetwork was presented and discussed with members of The Void, UKRAiNATV, 3022, and Konfluxus.
Closing Stream at Intermedia Department
The second and final evening program again took place at the Intermedia Department, taking on the format of a StreamArtNetwork livestream, with onsite and remote contributions from Krakow, Kyiv, and elsewhere, and including a conversation between Szabolcs Kisspál and Geert Lovink & sound performance of Ádám Jeneses. One of the highlights was the presentation of the new manifesto of the Vilnius collective and network member 3022, which can be found here.