Within the digital milieu – where networked, datafied, and algorithmically driven interactions unfold between people, technical systems, and the environment – new kinds of artificial and hybrid entities emerge that elude straightforward classification. Among these strange new species are so-called "mushroom" websites that proliferate in the Bulgarian webspace to spread disinformation and propaganda during political campaigns, only to disappear or become inactive once a campaign has run its course. Another odd being is "One Person," a 13-meter public statue in Sofia which broadcasts dynamic visual content through a computer algorithm combining video surveillance, dataveillance, and AI-generated text, forming a collective body in the process of constant self-actualization. In this Loops session, Veneta Androva and Venelin Shurelov will elaborate on the nature of these more-than-human actors and, in doing so, provide insight into their artistic practices and methodologies.

Venelin Shurelov is a visual artist, scenographer, and researcher working at the intersection of art, technology, and critical media practice. His work explores the hybridization of human and machine, automated systems, and the performative nature of contemporary technologies. He is the founder of ‘AUTOMATIC Gallery’, a 24/7 digital art space in Sofia, and the co-founder of ‘DA Fest’, as well as the MA Program in Digital Arts in Sofia. Shurelov’s projects have been presented internationally in exhibitions, festivals, and academic contexts, focusing on questions of perception, control, and technological fiction. He teaches and lectures on digital art, performance, and media theory.

https://www.subhumantheatre.com/

https://automatic.gallery/

‍

Veneta Androva is a visual artist living and working between Berlin and Sofia. Her practice focuses on CGI-based moving image and installation developed through research-driven artistic approaches. Working across single-channel works, multi-channel video, and spatial formats, she examines how contemporary realities are shaped by technological infrastructures, mediated information, and structures of power. Across her projects, Androva develops hybrid narratives in which documentary material and fiction intersect. Her films are internationally recognized with honors including the German Short Film Award (2020), Prix Ars Electronica (2021), and 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival, as well as presentations in institutional contexts across Europe and beyond.

https://venetaandrova.com

‍

Joining us are Dr. Anna Polze, media scholar at Ruhr University Bochum, whose work traces the visual cultures of migration and the crises of digital evidence; Fred Abrahams, former Human Rights Watch and now guest faculty at Bard College Berlin; and artists and researchers Engy El Shenawy and Federico Zurani, who explore how images and simulations construct narratives of war, testimony, and power.

The collaboration with Princeton University was developed together with journalist and professor Deborah Amos and her students. Together we hope to open a lasting collaboration and an ongoing conversation on investigative media aesthetics and on how journalism, art, and research can continue to document and question political realities.

We are thrilled to begin the academic year with this shared event that brings together universities, disciplines, and generations of inquiry. The session is open to the public and will be streamed live on our channels.

As always, we will end the night with drinks and informal conversation at our studio bar.

‍

@designandcomputation
@new_practice
@udkberlin
@tu_berlin

Poster Design
@fernandabraunsantos
@michelleduong_

With a background in interaction design and techno-animism, Judith Dörrenbächer explores how alternative ontologies can inform human-computer interaction, proposing animist approaches to the design of social robots. Andreas Muxel brings a material and speculative angle through his work on hybrid artifacts and physical human-machine interfaces, drawing from his experience in design research and education. Alessandro Mac-Nelly, working between architecture, AI, and critical machine aesthetics, will present recent experiments and reflections from his artistic-research practice, including his work with Algorithmic Cultural Vandalism.

Together, the three speakers will discuss modes of designing and understanding machines not as neutral tools, but as cultural actors, entities that shape and reflect our behaviors, desires, and educational paradigms.

The conversation is open to the public and encourages direct audience engagement. As always, the evening will close informally at the New Practice bar with drinks, music, and the chance to meet the speakers and community in a relaxed setting.

Production and Streaming ⁨@emansafavi⁩ and InKüLe

Matteo De Giuli is a writer, editor, and cultural critic. He is co-author of MEDUSA (NERO Editions) and co-runs the Medusa newsletter, a long-form project exploring the cultural and political dimensions of the climate crisis. He has contributed to platforms such as Il Tascabile (Treccani), National Geographic Italia, and Not, and served as editor-in-chief of Lucy for two years.
His work spans political ecology, speculative narrative, and the cultural imagination of the Anthropocene. Through essays, editorial projects, and discursive formats, he investigates how dominant narratives shape perceptions of crisis, and how alternative imaginaries might emerge. He has co-curated interdisciplinary programs such as Sensori. Qualcosa si muove (Ocean Space, Venice), developing research practices grounded in media, philosophy, and ecological thought.

Ian Stewart is a PhD candidate at The Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin (member of Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres), who researches how brains encode the body. He was a founding member of EDGE Neuroscience & Art e.V., a non-profit group of international artist-scientists, exploring intersections between art and neuroscience. Today he works in science policy and advocacy, where he develops ideas merging politics, science, and technologies. As an artist, he also produced installations and audio artworks while studying in Sydney, London, and Berlin.

Mindaugas Gapševičius delves into the intricate dynamics between non-human entities and human creativity while examining humanity’s impact on the environment. He completed his MA studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1999, followed by earning an MPhil from Goldsmiths University of London in 2016, and defending his PhD thesis at Bauhaus University Weimar in 2022. He played a pivotal role in founding Institutio Media, Lithuania’s premier media art platform (http://www.o-o.lt/1998/) in 1998, and later co-founded Migrating Art Academies (http://www.migaa.eu/), a pan-European network supporting emerging artists. He co-established a community based biolab, as well as Alt lab (https://www.o-o.lt/alt-lab/), a hub for non-disciplinary research based in Vilnius, and launched the Centre for Non-machines Research (https://www.facebook.com/non.machines).

Cade Diehm is the founder of the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology’s role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. With a multi-disciplinary background in information security, interface politics and digital systems, Cade and his team study digital infrastructure to understand how technology at scale influences the perspectives and safety of policy-makers, activists and researchers.

Benjamin Busch is a US-American visual artist living in Berlin. First trained as an architect (M.A. Arch.), he received his M.A. in Spatial Strategies in 2017 from the Weissensee Academy of Art, Berlin. In his artistic practice, he employs architecture as a narrative device to shed light on underrepresented communities. Through his critical writing, social practice, and mixed-media and multimedia artworks, Busch engages the production of space as a convergence of its perceived, conceived, and lived modalities.

kennedy+swan exhibit internationally in galleries, museums, and festivals. Exhibitions include the Lyon Biennial, Gropius Bau Berlin, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Bärenzwinger Berlin, CCBB Rio de Janeiro, Loop Discover Award and Sundance Film Festival. They live in Berlin.

The event takes place in our studio + livestream and is open to all.

The event takes place in our studio + livestream and is open to all.

Curated by Emma Sokoll

The event takes place in our studio and is open to all. A Livestream will be available.

Image Credits: Mustafah Abdulaziz, Arctic Series.

Propose Questions:
https://app.sli.do/event/2xnqbSLjwf3nK9nC5Gtssy/live/questions

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest “to solve intelligence” – a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. We are joined for a public talk and conversation with Matteo Pasquinelli, who instead suggests that the “mystery” of AI is just the automation of labour at the highest degree, not intelligence per se.

His new book The Eye of the Master (Verso Books, 2023) urges a new literacy on AI for scientists, journalists and new generations of activists, arguing that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage’s “calculating engines” of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surveillance.

The increasing incorporation of machine learning in neuroscience research as well as the use of the human brain as metaphor in current and historical conceptions of artificial intelligence, bring up the need for a (re)negotiation of intelligence, mind and brain, and consciousness. AA Cavia (Computer Scientist, Philosophy of Computation, Author of ‘Logiciel’), Prof. Dr. John-Dylan Haynes (Professor of Neuroscience, Director of BCAN, Charité) and Prof. Dr. Beate Krickel (Professor of Philosophy of Cognition & Dean of the Faculty for Humanities and Educational Sciences, Technical University Berlin ) will approach this negotiation from their specific perspectives, converging in a shared discussion.