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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].

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 (2020).

^[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).

 

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 30 – Penny as Producer Penny Rimbaud is best known as a founding member of the anarcho-punk collective Crass, as well as for his work as a poet, writer, and philosopher. But beyond these well-known aspects of his life and practice lies another, less frequently discussed dimension: his role as a […]

Los Angeles, June 4, 2025

Dear Geert—

More and more, I see what’s happening in the USA as a war on the young that they don’t even know they are fighting, much less how much they are losing. Much has been made of MAGA edgelords and the “vibeshift” towards conservatism, especially among young men. Perhaps more surprising was the move of young Latino and even Black men into the Trumpist camp, accounted for by both economic woes keeping them from buying the big ass truck of their macho dreams and a misogynoir generated by Kamala Harris, who embodied their worst nightmares of the scolding Human Resources director. Well, this first-person-shooter-playing, gonzo-porn-watching, anabolic-supplement-scarfing, Bitcoin-coveting, under-employed, and mostly white but vaguely multi-racial coalition of the overly on-line will start finding out that being chaos voters brings vastly more chaos down on them than on the older, richer cohort that continues to define the Republican party’s real power center.

Trump has established a new KKK, but this time it’s not about Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but rather the Kings of the KakiKleptoKryptotocracy he’s cementing into place. To break this down, kaki is shit, or rule by the worst, klepto is just pure theft, and krypto is the blockchain-enabled means by which the Trumpian fusion of conservatives, libertarians, nationalists, and flat-out racists are eating the seed corn of America’s future. This is the very future that is being chain sawed with every executive order, fluctuating tariff, and random cruelty that the administration throws at the wall to see if it hurts someone. In the past, only the hardest core Ayn Rand fans saw themselves as Omega men, those talented and righteous ones who’d gotten theirs and didn’t need to give anything back, much less pay forward—hence their antipathy verging on rage against the very idea of taxes. Combine with this with the even more virulent hatred of “the woke mind virus”—a third-rate locution reminiscent of B-movie sci-fi from the 1960s—in order to justify “owning the libs” as the highest goal of contemporary politics, no matter what the damage to the future.

The seed corns I’m talking about are the inheritances that allowed our present tech overlords to ascend to their own Silicon Valhallas: the trillions invested in basic research and the Internet, the rule of law that supports commerce and trade, the funding of cultural resources that can be monetized as content, even the civic and fiscal commitment to a literate and numerate population that can consume their wares.

All these factors and more combined to create the soft power, the Zivilmacht to use the German phrase, that America welded to its military might. Together these were fundamental to securing the preeminence of the American economy. This was the seedbed for the future of those young voters who have swung towards authoritarianism over the last three national US elections since 2016. As a result of their electoral choices, when it comes time for them to tend the fields, they’ll find that the generations that preceded them left the land barren, and the barn empty of anything to regenerate growth. All that these young voters—and the non-voters who were in vague sympathy with the “fun” of watching a television performer entertain them into ruin—get was the satisfaction of watching someone more powerful than them piss all over the people they don’t like.

The “adult entertainment” these dudes fap to owes a lot to a creative disruptor with the nom de porn Max Hardcore (born Paul Little, also known as Paul Steiner, died a convicted felon in 2023). In a memorable 1998 essay titled “Big Red Son,” David Foster Wallace writes about Max as the father of Gonzo porn, a genre that perpetrates “on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.” Foster Wallace writes about the man, his milieu, and his entourage in a way that feels eerily appropriate to describe the slippage between Trump the man, Trump the performer, Trump the President, and the sycophants and assorted cabinet members who surround him. “Good old Max Hardcore, for instance, is a total psychopath—that’s part of his on-screen Gonzo persona—but so is the real Max/Paul Steiner. You’d almost have to have been there in that suite. Max sits holding court in his hat and pointy boots, looking at once magisterial and mindless, while his red-suited acolytes laugh on cue and a jr. high dropout shows off her valves.” Max found economically distressed girls with rough family backgrounds and took them fresh off the bus in LA to be dressed as underaged jailbait, sodomized, urinated on, fisted, and “broken” (his word), all in service of the riches, attention, and fame Max craved. He repeated his philosophy (such as one can describe flat out violent misogyny) many times in videos and interviews: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”

Whole swaths of MAGA have adopted this Maximal cruelty: they are gleeful about the unhappiness of those around them. The love of liberal tears has become a taste for tears period, no matter if they are shed by political opponents, immigrants, trans athletes, furloughed scientists seeking cancer cures, fired federal park rangers, or anyone else who wanders into the present administration’s crosshairs. Years of faux-tough politicians, trash-talking radio hosts, and legions of Internet trolls have modeled a coarseness that inured the new MAGA demographics to empathy, and in so doing destroyed any civic trust that might be built up, much less solidarity.

That Silicon Valley’s oligarchs went all in for Trump this time round is not interesting in and of itself other than that it reaffirms that great wealth inexorably moves its holders towards authoritarianism, if not outright fascism. It’s also a reminder, as if we needed one, that empathy is not part of the tool set needed to generate a world-dominating fortunes. That young men with precarious economic prospects at best feel drawn to the same flame as the ultra-wealthy may be testament to diminishing returns democracy is getting from education in the 21^st century. Or maybe America’s addiction to get-rich-quick schemes like meme stocks, sports betting, crypto and multi-level marketing has deluded them into thinking they’re just temporarily impoverished alpha male billionaires.

What doesn’t seem to penetrate is that the new vibes and policies the young have swung towards aren’t going to do anything for them except make others in their exact cohort unhappy. Manufacturing won’t come back, what jobs get generated won’t be unionized, the safety net will become an ever more unsafe sieve, and the richest members of society will use their tax cuts to further wall themselves off from the proles via private schools, private clubs, private gates, and private security. There comes a time when even the most committed social theorist has to look at false consciousness and rebrand it as suicidal idiocy. This sort of analysis has been itself critiqued as an unwillingness to “listen to the other side,” but as we enter a post-literate, post-numerate moment best described as an ideology of feels what is there to “listen” to?

This isn’t even a Hobbesian war of all against all, it’s more like Survivor, with the wealthy and connected old as the producers, the ill-prepared young as the contestants, and a final prize that’s a sordid blend of kaki, klepto, and krypto. These young men will find that they are not really competitors at all, but merely NPCs, or non-player characters, in Trump 2.0 and his co-conspirators’ theater of cruelty. As Max Hardcore said of the actress he treated as NPCs, “By the time I’m done with them, they’re already dead inside.”

Hope you’re happy—

Peter

Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book s City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA. His previous letters to Geert can be found here.

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Voice and sound theorist Zeynep Bulut’s Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025) is a remarkable work that reconfigures the ways we define “voice.” The text is organized into three sections—Part 1: Plastic (Emergence of Voice as Skin), Part 2: Electric (Embodiment of Voice as Skin), and Part 3: Haptic (Mediation of Voice as Skin)—each articulating Bulut’s exploration of the simultaneously personal and collaborative ways voice evolves among various sonic entities and environments. Through analyses of several artistic works that experiment with sound, Bulut successfully highlights the social effects of these pieces and how they alter our expectations of what it means to communicate and be understood.

It’s easy to reduce one’s understanding of voice to the purely spoken, the dialogic, the linguistically communicative, but Bulut’s conception of voice reaches beyond these forms. In her introduction, she states that she represents voice as something that “…evolves, through varied sounds, senses, bodies and technologies. In other words… distributed forms and instances of voice, which underlie the making of a voice, instead of giving a voice to something or someone, or being given a voice” (1). Whereas it may be easy to consider voice as something insular and complete, Bulut argues that it is in fact highly contestable, and shifts based on various environmental/social circumstances—this she aptly labels the “plasticity of voice.” Since Bulut envisions voice as something malleable, this unearths its responsive potentials, and eventually leads us to the image that Bulut will repeatedly return to over the course of the text—”voice as skin.”

Initially, “voice as skin” may seem perplexing, as these two elements appear in direct contrast to each other. However, I believe that the blending of these assumedly divergent facets is what makes Bulut’s work and scholarship so strong. None of her arguments complacently subsiston the known, the expected, and so when she presents voice as skin, it makes sense that she has formed this concept in order to continue extending her readers’ understandings of how we embody and experience sound.

Voice as skin is meant to illuminate the responses and sonic productions that often go unnoticed. It is a dynamic presence that defies static restrictions desperate to make it only one thing. It is “…imagining voice as a multisensory interface, a tactile and haptic affect across bodies of all kinds, without being limited to the human body, to human audition or the labels of verbal language” (234). As you proceed with Bulut’s argument, voice as skin repeatedly arises in different, somewhat surprising iterations throughout the chapters, continuously reframing the ways one may consider the experiential potentials and qualities of sound. “Voice is already a plural phenomenon” (218) Bulut states, “Each one of us carries another’s voice” (218). Everyone is in possession of their own sonic productions, but because we exist within a shared sonic landscape—Bulut regards this through Bruce Odland’s concept of the “sonic commons”—we have to become more sensitive resonant sources for the sounds that are directed at and emerge from this voice as skin.

Bulut makes it clear that there is a consequence to sound. Even when an individual is not engaged in dialogue or aurally responding to some other sonic stimuli, there is a voicing—a reaction, a sensing, a renegotiation of the body within the shifting soundscape—that occurs. Bulut analyzes a myriad of experimental sound artworks throughout Building a Voice, but her analysis of Pauline Oliveros’s Environmental Dialogue is where she really drives home the various ways in which one may “respond” to sound: “You listen to the sound attentively, and may respond to it or not… Regardless of a vocal or instrumental articulation of a pitch, therewould be a mental reinforcement in the process” (68). In later chapters, specifically those in Part 3 that discuss gesture as voice and biosensing musical interfaces, Bulut states that “Bodies constantly talk” (173)—that is, they inherently articulate something that either represents themselves or a reaction to another sonic production.

What Bulut’s readers receive throughout Building a Voice is a work of scholarship that strives against the possibility of sonic apathy. Even while attempting to not respond to a sound or pitch, one still notes—pun intended—the impact of these sonic productions on themselves and the space around them. Not saying anything is still a statement, Bulut reveals. It still “voices.”

Bulut’s diversification of voicing is astounding to read, but what I admire most about Building a Voice is that it underscores the importance of hearing. When Bulut discusses the ways we do or do not listen, I believe her scholarship becomes especially timely. In Part 2, Chapter 6: “Sharing a Skin,” Bulut describes the limits of empathy when it comes to fully hearing another individual: “We hear one another through our own wounds and then only partially” (134). She doesn’t make this claim to invalidate others’ efforts to show empathy. In fact, I think there is significant care contained in this specific argument. Rather than believe one is innately endowed with the skills to hear someone, or assume someone has the ability to fully hear us, Bulut encourages her readers to approach these experiences with humility:

We may be frustrated with the fact that no one truly understands or hears us, or that someone imagines that they understand us when they don’t. There is no full translation or hearing of anything. We can only connect in parts. We can only be a sounding board that both echoes and diffracts (134).

We are living in a time where several historically vulnerable communities face daily antagonization at home and abroad. Simply opening social media will present you with multiple posts pleading for allies to speak out for those facing ridicule, abuse, and even annihilation. For individuals who elect to answer those calls—who feel compelled to take on the profound commitment of assuming a “voice” for these communities—Bulut’s book provides some necessary food for thought. If we cannot fully hear nor understand those we wish to advocate for or protect, how might we renegotiate our current styles of activism away from the idea of “giving voice” (or, for that matter, considering anyone to be “voiceless”)? How might we honor the differences between individuals without viewing this as a move toward disconnection, an acceptance of inaction?

Building a Voice is an exciting text because it presents one with so many beautiful examples of experimental sound art, but I believe it becomes asocially integral work when Bulut indicates why revolutionizing the way we execute our methods of hearing and voicing is so important. By this, she doesn’t just illustrate the ways in which one builds a voice, she also reveals how one builds a kind of sonic and social consciousness. To read Building a Voice is to have one’s understanding of their own and the world’s resonant capabilities irreversibly transformed. This is writing about sound on another frequency—it’s time to tune in.

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Featured Image: “Plantar Aspect,” by Pekka Nikrus, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Enikő Deptuch Vághy is a poet, artist, and editor. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Additionally, she is the Founding EIC of the literary and arts journal Lover’s Eye Press. 

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

Listening to and through “Need”: Sound Studies and Civic Engagement–Christie Zwahlen

“Listening to the Border: ‘”2487″: Giving Voice in Diaspora’ and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchez”-D. Ines Casillas

By Armin Medosch,

This book is a message in a bottle that washed ashore ten years after it was sent. Armin Medosch began documenting self-managed local networking initiatives with his book Freie Netze published in the German language in 2004. He iteratively developed The Rise of the Network Commons in draft chapters published on his website, The Next Layer, from 2013 until 2015, before his death in 2017.

The Rise of the Network Commons is a cultural history of ‘the exciting world of wireless community network projects’ that spread from its origins in London, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen to Spain, Greece, North- and South America, and Africa. While deploying cutting-edge technology, the movement is made up of technical, social, and artistic hackers with a range of backgrounds and skills.

This is the twofold thesis that Armin develops in this book: Involving ordinary people in building a network commons has a profound emancipatory effects on them. At the same time, doing so contributes to the democratization of technology: As a community we can begin to shape future technologies to serve our local needs rather than benefit commercial interests.

As a history of community infrastructure, The Rise of the Network Commons is a highly topical narrative for strengthening the resilience of our local last mile digital infrastructures and re-enforcing regional digital self-sovereignty through direct community participation and knowledge sharing. We build the wireless commons by becoming sovereign neighbors of practice and expertise.

Armin Medosch (1962 – 2017) was an Austrian media artist, journalist, curator, theorist, critic, and a pioneer of internet culture in Europe. As art activist, he co-initiated the transformation of the ship MS Stubnitz, a former GDR deep-sea fishing vessel, into a floating art space. He is well recognized as a journalist and as the co-editor of Telepolis. As an academic he earned a Master of Arts in Interactive Digital Media at the University of Sussex and a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London and continued to his last days to publish, teach and research.

Author: Armin Medosch

Edited by: Volker Ralf Grassmuck and Adam Burns

With special thanks to: Ina Zwerger, Elektra Aichele, Panayotis Antoniadis, Gregers Baur-Petersen, Andreas Bräu, Sebastian Büttrich, Teresa Dillon, André Gaul, Aaron Kaplan, Geert Lovink, Monic Meisel, Mauricio Román Miranda, Jürgen Neumann, Ignacio Nieto Larrain, Julian Priest, Enrique Rivera, Tim Schütz, Felix Stalder, Thomas Thaler, Ulf Treger, Sven (C-ven) Wagner, Simon Worthington, Manuel Orellana Sandoval and everyone at Señal 3, TV Piola.

Cover design: Katja van Stiphout

Book production and design: Ruben Stoffelen

Order a copy HERE

Download PDF

Download EPUB

By Kacper Greń (visuals) and Kuba Szreder (text)

This comic tells the story of the duckrabbit, the spirit animal of postartistic practice.  The coming of the duckrabbits was envisioned already in 1971 by art theoretician Jerzy Ludwiński, when he wrote: ‘Perhaps, even today, we do not deal with art. We might have overlooked the moment when it transformed itself into something else, something which we cannot yet name. It is certain, however, that what we deal with offers greater possibilities.’ The duckrabbit emerged in in the 2010s – a decade overshadowed by looming authoritarianism and multiplying crises – when it became the spirit animal of Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office for Postartistic Services in Warsaw, Poland. Living and working inside and out of museums, art history, objecthood, street protests, and artist studios, the duckrabbits found their habitats in unusual and ambivalent places, resistant to the dominant forces of the mainstream art world and political suppression.

It takes a duckrabbit village to bring a comic to life. The initial impulse came from duckrabbits-in-arms Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Marianka Dobkowska, and Bogna Stafańska, curators of the Postartistic Congress. The first edition was commissioned by commissioned by the Insitu Foundation. The narrative draws from years of making and thinking together with the Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office of Postartistic Services (co-run with the Bęz Zmiana Foundation in Warsaw). The initial version of this comic was drafted by Kacper Greń during the seminar ‘Art Beyond Art’ led by Kuba Szreder at the Department for Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The final print edition is published as an INC Zine by the Institute of Network Cultures, coordinated by Sepp Eckenhaussen.

Visuals: Kacper Greń
Text: Kuba Szreder
Coordination & production: Sepp Eckenhaussen
Print: GPS Group, Slovenia

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2025
ISBN: 978-90-82520-91-9

Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

This publication is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Order a free copy of Duckrabbits Unveiled here: https://networkcultures.org/publications/order-inc-publications
Or download the PDF here: http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/duckrabbits_ONLINE.pdf

By Kacper Greń (visuals) and Kuba Szreder (text)

This comic tells the story of the duckrabbit, the spirit animal of postartistic practice.  The coming of the duckrabbits was envisioned already in 1971 by art theoretician Jerzy Ludwiński, when he wrote: ‘Perhaps, even today, we do not deal with art. We might have overlooked the moment when it transformed itself into something else, something which we cannot yet name. It is certain, however, that what we deal with offers greater possibilities.’ The duckrabbit emerged in in the 2010s – a decade overshadowed by looming authoritarianism and multiplying crises – when it became the spirit animal of Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office for Postartistic Services in Warsaw, Poland. Living and working inside and out of museums, art history, objecthood, street protests, and artist studios, the duckrabbits found their habitats in unusual and ambivalent places, resistant to the dominant forces of the mainstream art world and political suppression.

It takes a duckrabbit village to bring a comic to life. The initial impulse came from duckrabbits-in-arms Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Marianka Dobkowska, and Bogna Stafańska, curators of the Postartistic Congress. The first edition was commissioned by commissioned by the Insitu Foundation. The narrative draws from years of making and thinking together with the Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office of Postartistic Services (co-run with the Bęz Zmiana Foundation in Warsaw). The initial version of this comic was drafted by Kacper Greń during the seminar ‘Art Beyond Art’ led by Kuba Szreder at the Department for Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The final print edition is published as an INC Zine by the Institute of Network Cultures, coordinated by Sepp Eckenhaussen.

Visuals: Kacper Greń
Text: Kuba Szreder
Coordination & production: Sepp Eckenhaussen
Print: GPS Group, Slovenia

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2025
ISBN: 978-90-82520-91-9

Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

This publication is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Order a free copy of Duckrabbits Unveiled here: https://networkcultures.org/publications/order-inc-publications
Or download the PDF here: http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/duckrabbits_ONLINE.pdf