Tactics&Practice [podcast]

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 digital life. Focusing on their “God Mode” trilogy and the latest artwork Big Things Coming (2026) at Chemist, London from July this year, the conversation traces a world of AI reward hacking, synthetic training data and algorithmic misbehaviour through simulated supermarkets, theatrical game engines and self-playing videogames.

From image-caption datasets and the Waluigi effect to data labour, optimisation metrics and the limits of language, the episode examines how machine learning systems not only represent the world but actively reshape it. Along the way, we discuss embodiment and consciousness through the work of N. Katherine Hayles, systemic realism, the aesthetics of lossy digital environments, and why leaving language behind for something like dance might offer a way out of computational logic.

RELATED LINKS

https://dmstfctn.net

https://www.instagram.com/dmstfctn

GOD MODE: Episode 3: Big things coming

Waluigi’s Purgatory

Sad Luigi game Ennuigi 1.0 by Josh Millard. Thanks to Petra Szemán for the link up!
N.B in the episode I say the game is based on a sad Waluigi, but it’s actually based on a sad Luigi.

COCO dataset

 Grim Fandango game

The paper Depressive Realism: Four Theoretical Perspectives was published in 1988 by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson in the book Cognitive Processes in Depression published by Guilford Press on May 27, 1988.

 Quake III Arena bot

COLOPHON

Host: Rebecca Edwards
Guest: dmstfctn

Recording: Rebecca Edwards
Music: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Rebecca Edwards, Janez Fakin Janša
Audio post-production: Oskar Kandare, Staš Kramar

Becoming Image podcast series

Curated by: Rebecca Edwards
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2026

Part of:
tactics&practice#17: Becoming Image
Curated by Marco De Mutiis

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana

The post S6 [Becoming Image] E1: Who’s Still Here? [w/dmstfctn] appeared first on Aksioma.

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 signal might risk exposure, every utterance (no matter how critical) might feed and stabilize future intelligence. Confronting the determinism and violence embedded in life on- and offline, Konior offers not escape, but the strange solace found in facing the world as it is.

RELATED LINKS

Bogna Konior
https://www.bognamk.com

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Politi, 2025)
https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet–9781509569250

[The LLM Brainrot article mentioned in this episode]
LLMs Can Get ‘Brain Rot’!

COLOPHON

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Bogna Konior

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E5: Silence in the Dark Forest [w/Bogna Konior] appeared first on Aksioma.

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 inhabitation”, subtle tendencies and collective habits accrue power, shaping new infrastructures of care, possibility, and resistance.

RELATED LINKS

Carolyn Pedwell, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens University Press, 2021)
https://www.mqup.ca/revolutionary-routines-products-9780228006220.php

Carolyn Pedwell and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), Affect Theory Reader 2 (Duke University Press, 2023)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-affect-theory-reader-2

E.K. Sedgewick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is About You
https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/sss/pdfs/Critique/sedgwick-paranoid-reading.pdf

Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Duke University Press, 2016)https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-minor-gesture

Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2013)
https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-optimism

COLOPHON

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Carolyn Pedwell

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E4: Revolution in the Minor Key [w/Carolyn Pedwell] appeared first on Aksioma.

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 not be able to escape the machine, but could yet seduce it off-script.

RELATED LINKS

Shaka McGlotten, Black Data
https://www.academia.edu/16303256/Black_Data

Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Suny Press, 2013):
https://sunypress.edu/Books/V/Virtual-Intimacies

Shaka McGlotten, Dragging, Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life (Routledge, 2022):
https://www.routledge.com/Dragging-Or-in-the-Drag-of-a-Queer-Life/McGlotten/p/book/9780367439521

COLOPHON

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Shaka McGlotten

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E3: Hexing the Algorithm [w/Shaka McGlotten] appeared first on Aksioma.

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 *planetary computation* (take a shot) through strategic inhabitation. If the predator overlooks the noise, what might we build in its blind spots?

RELATED LINKS

Alex Quicho
https://amfq.xyz

Alex Quicho, girlstack
https://girlstack.substack.com/

Girl Intelligence (Aksioma, 2025)
https://aksioma.org/girl-intelligence

Noura Tafeche, Alex Quicho, She’s Evil, Most Definitively Subliminal
https://aksioma.org/ayasu/conference/shes-evil-most-definitively-subliminal

Alex Quicho, Everyone Is A Girl Online
https://www.wired.com/story/girls-online-culture/

Alex Quicho, The Gore Layer:
https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho

Alex Quicho, Small Gods (Zero Books, 2021):
https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/zer0-books/our-books/small-gods

Alex Quicho, GIRLSTACK, BODYSTACK Summit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgZvs56WxXU

Alex Quicho, Prey Mode, BODYSTACKED Summit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4hwM4ljoh4

COLOPHON

Host: Neja Berger
Guest: Alex Quicho

Recording: Neja Berger
Music and audio mix: Gašper Torkar
Editing: Neja Berger, Janez Fakin Janša

Are You a Software Update? podcast series

Curated by: Neja Berger
Coordinated by: Janez Fakin Janša
Produced by: Marcela Okretič

Production:
Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2025

Part of:
tactics&practice#16: Are You a Software Update?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú, Socrates Stamatatos, Janez Fakin Janša, Neja Berger

Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Nova Gorica

The post S5 [Are You A Software Update?] E2: The Girl’s Inhuman Arsenal [w/Alex Quicho] appeared first on Aksioma.