Tactics&Practice [podcast]

What does it mean to have more AI generated images online than images created by humans? Should we resist constant uptime, visibility, and acceleration? And do we need to rethink reality in the age of AI when ‘default fakeness’, ‘flippening’ and ‘image amnesia’? In the final episode, I’m joined by designer, artist and cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot alongs...

What infrastructures shape what we’re allowed to do, see, or become? From Technical to Hot to Operational, what are the political ontologies of the contemporary image and how might we rethink interfacing with interfaces? In this episode, artist Ben Grosser traces his background and early interest in computer music and scientific imaging, as well as early experiments in destabilising software assum...

What does it mean to imagine alternatives to prescripted narratives when AI has already prescribed the rules of the world? How to navigate prescriptive AI systems to prototype other worlds, other rules, and other ways of playing within algorithmic constraint? In this episode, curator and writer Milia Xin Bi discusses how board games and tabletop RPGs shape her practice exploring media art, emergin...

What does thinking or imaging look like when it’s optimised for scroll, repetition, and affect? When thinking itself becomes “scrollified” how do repetition, optimisation, and affect rewire imagination, compress attention, and turn imaging itself into something endlessly refreshed, looped, and platform-shaped? In this episode, London-based British-Nigerian interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Di...

Who are we when our identities are shaped through interfaces, datasets, and platforms? And what does it mean to see, to be seen, or to become visible when every act of seeing is mediated by software?   dmstfctn (Francesco Tacchini and Oliver Smith) join the podcast to discuss their decade-long collaboration exploring simulation, fiction and the hidden systems that shape contemporary digi...

What if the universe is silent not because it’s empty, but because intelligence knows when to hide? Writer and theorist Bogna Konior traces a forgotten genealogy linking early internet pioneers, ufology, and AI research to argue that the web functions as a site of first contact with inhuman cognition. Drawing on Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest Theory, she reframes communication as predation: every s...

In a time of live-streamed genocide, it has truly never been more clear that witnessing suffering will not automatically trigger social transformation. If the answer is not in shocking jolts and major ruptures, what power might lie in the minor key? Professor and author Carolyn Pedwell weaves pragmatist philosophy, affect theory and contemporary social movements to reveal how “affective inhabitati...

What if seduction—not dissection—could fracture algorithmic control? Artist, researcher and author Shaka McGlotten guides us through witchy warfare against quantification, deploying computational hexes, opacity, fugitivity and improvisational sabotage. Having given up on dialectics and excavation, we embrace surface-level dissociation, shifting from exit to error, from critique to conjure. We may...

Forget Boy-Philosophy: here, we know that surfaces are sites of power and lambs are fluent in the noise of the world. But where is the difference between poetry and theory? In this episode, theorist and artist Alex Quicho dissects her concept of the Girl – a tripartite technology of subjectivity weaving the symbolic, the consumer and the inhuman – to offer a roadmap for navigating *pla...

Is there a way to define memes without implicitly memifying everything? We move through the definitional morass of memetics and meme studies towards researcher Sophie Publig’s critical posthumanist account of memes as sympoietic agents. From in-group jokes and troll hoaxes on early image-boards to Tiktok and the GameStop short squeeze, memes’ accelerated lifespans end up leading us to the esoteric...

We have lived alongside dogs for thousands of years. How close have we grown to each other since we first domesticated them? In one of her performances, artist Maja Smrekar biologically manipulated her body so that she could use her own breast milk to feed an Icelandic Spitz puppy. Behind its spectacular and, for some, controversial guises, Smrekar’s exploration of transpecies motherhood probed un...

Smart cities across the world are pioneering chatbots, autonomous vehicles and AI technologies to help streamline bureaucratic services, facilitate police recruitment, fill in potholes or locate resources at the library. Could algorithmic systems of control and governance be applied to all public services? Could an ultra-efficient AI kitten centralise and impersonate all the services, authorities...

Can everything – including vision, flexibility, imagination and other skills often associated with creative practices – be turned into data? Should artists feel threatened by AIs that compose music, make animation movies or write novels? Or is there something intrinsically uncomputable in the artistic mind? Are predictive algorithms creators’ friends or foes? Can you automate artistic processes an...

Darknet markets, identity shielding, bots and cryptocurrencies have revolutionised commerce and society, each in its own way. What happens when you bring all these disrupting ingredients together? Doma Smoljo and Carmen Weisskopf from !Mediengruppe Bitnik created a piece of software that randomly buys goods and services on the darknet and then gets them shipped to an art gallery. Alongside the pas...

Internet has obliterated borders, distances and other hallmarks of geography, making us forget its material reality: its data centres, wires, routers, processors and a vast network of intercontinental cables. Artist Evan Roth has travelled the globe to make infrared videos of coastal landscapes where fiberoptic submarine cables emerge from the sea to enable communication across oceans. Contemplati...

Can you make video games about environmental justice or labour? How about religion, the military, gun violence, mass incarceration, immigration or the Anthropocene? Can you entertain players with such hard-hitting matters? Can you use games to make players reflect on ethics, politics and the economy? Since 2003, MOLLEINDUSTRIA has been devising “artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream enter...

What does it feel to infiltrate or work alongside structures of power that most of us find impersonal and intimidating? How do you capitalise on the systemic loopholes and quirks inherent to institutions of authority such as intelligence agencies, corporations, bureaucracies and law enforcement agencies? Artist, author and filmmaker Jill Magid makes use of small institutional quirks to establish a...

In 2000, during the presidential race between George Bush and Al Gore, a group of “Maverick Austrian Business People” launched a platform that gave US voters the possibility to auction off their votes to bidders on the internet. Thirteen US states attempted to shut down the project with temporary restraining orders and injunctions. The media circus around the project was mind-boggling. As for the...

The discussion about the growing list of looted and illicitly acquired museum treasures is one that most Westerners would rather not think about. Unless a scandal, a protest, a movie or a contemporary artwork forces ex-colonising countries to confront the firm grip that their institutions maintain on access to knowledge, cultural materials and the global narratives of history. Since 2016, Nora Al-...

Over the years, Trevor Paglen has documented operations, locations and activities that were meant to remain hidden from the public. He has tracked and photographed the world of secret satellites, flew in a helicopter over the NSA headquarters with the express purpose of taking aerial photographs of it and, in the early 2000s, investigated the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme which consist...

Internet aesthetics like vaporwave, the Backrooms and weirdcore seem to offer glimpses of alternate realities beyond the threshold of the real. From Freud’s “uncanny” to hauntology’s spectral futures, these are aesthetics that revel in the strange, the eerie and the infinitely ambiguous – a messy, chaotic antidote to the ruthlessly curated digital landscapes we’re fed today. Art historian and cura...

If we paraphrase McLuhan, today’s medium is the algorithm: how is this universal mediator shaping us as content creators and consumers? How does it feel to be online amid different polarising forces, when consensus reality has completely broken down? Günseli Yalcinkaya, writer and researcher specialising in youth and internet culture, has been immersing herself in the insane hidden pits of the int...

What exactly is in the images generated by AI? Is it possible to decode training datasets and detect biases that fusion models, such as Dall-E or Midjourney, reproduce? Eryk Salvaggio , researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence, suggests a method that enables anyone to peel off the layers behind the datasets. Exploiting the ghost human...

Predictive models based on big data are founded on the idea that knowing the past enables us to predict the future, but what kind of future are we constructing when the models are based on a deepfake version of the past? Correlation has overtaken causation, while homophily shadows differences across these models that are not only applied in social media platforms’ algorithms, but also in policing...

The rise of computation in the 1950s shifted society to one constructed purely in commercial terms, where selling and buying have become the main social relation and every possible human form of contact is reimagined as a service or a product. What does this imply for the self? When individuals are broken up into parts that are measurable as data streams, the self is quantified and life is underst...