Bogna Konior | New York University Shanghai (original) (raw)
RECENT by Bogna Konior
Contemporanea A Glossary for the Twenty-First Century, 2024
Exonet, not internet.
Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, 2023
[email bogna@nyu.edu for full copy] As debates around artificial intelligence discourses beyond... more [email bogna@nyu.edu for full copy]
As debates around artificial intelligence discourses beyond the West draw
increased attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe
remains a neglected territory. Due to only recent entry of Eastern European
scholars into a discipline formalized in the United States in the 1970s, and
because of constraints on intellectuals and scientists under Soviet rule,
debates in Eastern Europe that prefigure some of the contemporary
discussions in media studies are often unknown. In this chapter, looking to
expand the canon of media theory and philosophy, I investigate the
allusions to AI in Summa Technologiae, a unique work at the intersection of
philosophy and popular science published in 1964 by Polish intellectual
and science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Though neither ‘artificial
intelligence’ nor ‘media studies’ were established terms at the time, Lem’s
futurology, focusing on the relationship of technology to human cognitive
capacities and evolutionary trajectories, anticipates discussions around
possible models of AI. I introduce Summa and contextualize it within the
Polish intellectual scene at the time, which uniquely combined Catholic
theology with cybernetics. I also put forth my reading of Lem’s imagination
of AI as a ‘gnostic machine:’ an evolutionary, existential technology that
operates at the limit of human comprehension.
Redacted , 2021
Planetary state change is narrated as an invasion by technologies alien to our human logic of sex... more Planetary state change is narrated as an invasion by technologies alien to our human logic of sexual reproduction. But humans are increasingly also reproducing by converting biomass into artifice, not unlike what nanobots are imagined to do..
Post-Memes (Punctum Press) , 2019
'While apocalyptic memes can be explained by the medium’s inherent—often ironic—humor, they are a... more 'While apocalyptic memes can be explained by the medium’s inherent—often ironic—humor, they are also the evidence of grappling with the insufficiency of politics at this moment of perceived crisis. Some express panic about civilizational decline, some joke about doom becoming our status quo. Others still wrestle with abstraction and, perhaps unwillingly informed by the possibility of actual extinction in the era that has been called the Anthropocene, challenge the idea of sufficient human agency. Dehumanization, anonymity, and doom are symptomatic not only of what the current (Western) political sphere on the Internet styles itself to be, but also of a larger shift in experiencing the inefficiency of human politics.'
EastEast, 2020
Did aliens visit Poland? How good was Victor Hugo at geopolitics? Why did the Irish locate the mo... more Did aliens visit Poland? How good was Victor Hugo at geopolitics? Why did the Irish locate the moon in Eastern Europe? What brought together Poles and Haitians? Through childhood memories, lesser known histories, mythological conspiracies, and theoretical physics, Bogna Konior explores the complex entanglement of dreams and actualities that makes up a nation. Text here: https://easteast.world/en/posts/130
Flugschriften , 2020
'The dark forest theory of the internet is about the risk tied to the very passport we need to en... more 'The dark forest theory of the internet is about the risk tied to the very passport we need to enter our everyday cyberspace: communication, screening the self, telling the truth about ourselves, revealing or concealing our coordinates. It is not a winning game plan or a blueprint for “change”, but a description. Web 2.0 rests on two axioms. First, sociality is a primary human need, communication is necessary for survival. Second, sociality is the carrier of all human conflict. More sociality, more entropy. Our nervous systems cannot distinguish between sociality and survival, and so we are sentenced to each other. The whole internet has been dealt that dead hand.'
Undercurrent, 2020
Machines, aliens, Octopolis, aquaforming, industrial cephalopods prosperity, interspecies enginee... more Machines, aliens, Octopolis, aquaforming, industrial cephalopods prosperity, interspecies engineering. For Alice dos Reis' show 'Undercurrent.'
ENV/TECH by Bogna Konior
New Formations , 2022
Written in 2015 (!), when I was obsessed with ontological turn, perspectivism, interspecies media... more Written in 2015 (!), when I was obsessed with ontological turn, perspectivism, interspecies media arts, posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and rats.
Abstract: This article considers ‘perspectivism’ as described by Viveiros de Castro and Willerslev as a lens for discussing interspecies media arts. In what way could we think about ‘personhood’ in order for the proposition of ‘nonhuman persons’ to make sense, while escaping the determinism of colloquial anthropomorphism, where humans simply project some idea of themselves onto others? How could this in turn inform our interpretation of interspecies art in urban spaces? The ethically controversial art of Japanese collective Chim↑Pom, who break into Fukushima ‘no-go’ zones, capture and kill rats, and lure flock of scavenger crows out of their hiding spots, creates situations where humans and animals relate to each other within a predatory loop of damage and toxicity; a perspectivism for the era of urban waste. The article further raises questions about the historical context of these artworks: post-nuclear spaces, alien and invasive species, and ‘the Anthropocene.’ Unlike stereotypical ‘green art,’ Chim↑Pom’s work grasps human-animal relationships through the lens of animosity, where personalisation and ethics are rooted in conflict. Reading their art through an unusual parallel with animist hunting practices that form the basis of ‘traditional’ perspectivism, the article reflects on these asymmetrically related but proximate frameworks and the current revival of scholarly interest in animism.
Mapping Crisis Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping, 2020
Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space not time th... more Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us. (John Berger cited in Toscano and Kinkle, 2015, p. 87)
Paradoxa: Climate-Fictions, 2020
[Full paper here: https://bit.ly/3lSbchb Message me for author's copy if needed.] What is climat... more [Full paper here: https://bit.ly/3lSbchb
Message me for author's copy if needed.]
What is climate fiction? Humanities quarrel over the nature of this newly christened genre, pointing to its activist dimensions and pondering its relationship to realism. In this article, I discuss how digital media studies should enter this debate by analyzing climate simulations as a type of climate fiction, one that lies at the core of any subsequent narrative retellings. The status of climate change itself as a simulation signals that by relegating ‘climate fiction’ to a genre, we miss the opportunity to address the larger net of our climate episteme, where fiction operates on multiple levels. I draw parallels between simulated social scenarios in cli fi and simulated scientific scenarios in climate models, and discuss how climate models are like petri dishes for growing fictional Earths in. Rather than cli fi being a ‘retelling’ of what is knowable through ‘climate data,’ I describe how digital climate simulations rely on creating artificial Earths that are worlds unto themselves. It is both through cultural and scientific climate fictions that we model future scenarios. This modelling, a type of ‘fiction’ is in fact the dominant mode of realism with regards to climate change.
Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture and Technology, 2017
How could we reconcile these two ethical and political projects: on the one hand, a desire to see... more How could we reconcile these two ethical and political projects: on the one hand, a desire to seek a politics beyond the existing history of humanism, on the other, a precaution to not fall in line with the violent history that dehumanisation had already amassed? In the Anthropocene, art is often charged with the task of " fictionalising " nature beyond the known and the human; yet in this paper, I propose that it could also produce a science-fiction or a philo-fiction of humanity itself. Looking at various examples of Natalie Jeremijenko's work, I argue that she approximates a politics that does not yet exist: a practice of " generic humanity " in times of interspecies environmental vulnerability. Theorising her work at the intersection of animism and non-philosophy, I label it a non-standard animism, a modelling of governance through non-standard personalisation, which provides cross-species, biometric tools.
Symploke: Theoretical, Cultural and Literary Scholarship, 2019
For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibilit... more For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibility of climate change, especially as it relates to the dark bed of the oceans, is unnerving. The oceans are persistently screened: as the human inability to envision large-scale geo-logical politics is laid bare, we are surrounded by ever more innovative machinic eyes. While singular disasters related to climate change produce news events, the ongoing pollution of the oceans does not qualify for live coverage. Is it not surprising that visual culture - from mainstream disaster movies to activist artworks - has taken it upon itself to fill this vacant space of attention. Taking as my case study sculptural installations by Jason deCaires Tylor, which can be viewed underwater or on a screen, in this paper, I theorise a ‘blue’ type of mediation, arguing that durational decay is a trait of oceanic media in the climate change era. This temporal decomposition links blue media to drowned histories that underwrite the Anthropocene, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and the Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic figures as an unmarked grave site. Referring to the work of Zylinska and Kember as well as Väliaho, I argue that as the ocean is increasingly defined by death, the mediation of life becomes necessary in the absence of a live climate change event. Blue media perform their disappearance, thus recalling other disappearances of life in the waters, while they also participate in the neoliberal imperative to capture the productive capacities of life. In their aesthetic decomposition, where disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and decomposition by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety as to the finitude of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own capture within the neoliberal logic of production.
Speculative Ecologies , 2020
'The self-proclaimed ethical desire to become animal hides another longing: that to become techno... more 'The self-proclaimed ethical desire to become animal hides another longing: that to become technologies. For do we become animals through these virtual reality experiences? Not at all – this is not how the animals see. It is how the technology is configured to see. We ‘become’ technology. We become the eye of the camera. The camera is, however, no longer the mechanic “third eye” that early films theorists such as Dziga Vertov celebrated. The camera is a computer. It renders rather than records.'
FEM/ TƎCH by Bogna Konior
_AH Journal, 2019
During the presidential election of 2001, a decade after Poland became independent from the USSR,... more During the presidential election of 2001, a decade after Poland became independent from the USSR, the cyberactivist collective CUKT (Central Bureau of Technical Culture) wrote a “civic electoral software,” which included a presidential candidate called Wiktoria Cukt, a female-presenting, ginger-haired avatar, resembling a glam classical Hollywood actress, wearing an elegant coiffure and a string of pearls.11 The opening of each new electoral headquarters was a mixed media warehouse rave with Wiktoria’s animated physique projected onto the walls. Anyone could submit the postulates they wished for her to represent via an online database. Everything that happened was filmed, digitised and circulated online, while at the same time the collective bought airtime on tv and ran a multi-poster campaign in major Polish cities. Programmed as an amalgamation of her society’s beliefs, she was a cybernetic phantom, an unedited summation of political desires and grievances.
Perrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 2019
If xenofeminism is a platform, a program, a protocol, a tool that can be grasped across its diffe... more If xenofeminism is a platform, a program, a protocol, a tool that can be grasped across its different iterations, it is united by the desire to write the outside in, to undermine what appears natural and therefore lend itself to continued context-dependent use of technology.
Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art, Hong Kong, 2016
The recently published Xenofeminist Manifesto re-fashions accelerationist politics into radical f... more The recently published Xenofeminist Manifesto re-fashions accelerationist politics into radical feminism. Arguing for a universalist xeno-politics borne out of alienation, xenofeminists see in nature an arch-enemy, aligning with the algorithmical intelligence of technology instead, celebrating artifice and strangeness as the foundation of revolutionary politics to come. In this paper, I argue that nature is but a phantom limb tied to the decaying body of post-Enlightenment modernity. Following the ontological turn in anthropology, I argue that by legitimizing constructed dualisms of nature and technology, xenofeminism fuels the very logic that it seeks to overrun. Enlisting only with nonhumans that it perceives as technological, xenofeminism excludes a number of allies, such as nonhuman animals. Passing beyond the limits of this nature/culture dualism could open xenofeminism up to a full spectrum of nonhuman confederates and lay foundation for speculative aesthetics for all alien subjects.
Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, 2017
With the publication of The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (2011), which f... more With the publication of The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (2011), which famously included only one female contributor, the focus on existence beyond the faulty correlation of ontology and epistemology asserted itself as the focal point of philosophical inquiry. When the spider spins its web, it weaves some of the lines from the center outward—these are called radial. Threads that go around are called orb lines. To the speculative turn, feminism is not a radial line, something that extends from within the centre, but an orb. It is an act of enclosure as revealing: those who proclaimed speculation were too busy weaving their webs to see that they already lived inside an insect colony.
Cyberfeminism is an occult form of warfare. It understands about ‘cyberspace’ what Cixin Liu’s ‘d... more Cyberfeminism is an occult form of warfare. It understands about ‘cyberspace’ what Cixin Liu’s ‘dark forest’ theory understands about the cosmos: all existence is determined by hostility and so the highest form of intelligence lies in occluding one’s coordinates. The hypothesis explains why the universe, statistically full of life, is dead silent. It is not because, as is commonly thought, life has not found a way to communicate, but because it understands that silence is the most advanced form of intelligence. Our physical and virtual spaces, which are increasingly inseparable, are alike a dark forest, where every step must be taken with care, as revealing one’s existence portends annihilation. The most desirable skill, the most coveted trick, and the most longed for disposition can only be this—a fluency in the trading of secrets. The skills we need to strategically deploy concealment, de-concealment and re-concealment.
MEDIA/PHILOSOPHY by Bogna Konior
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, 2020
As David Roden writes, “a biomorphic posthumanism is no longer about the human relation to the fu... more As David Roden writes, “a biomorphic posthumanism is no longer about the human relation to the future... It is the insurgency of an Outside... We have no transcendental access to this ‘doll space’ prior to making it.” Similarly, as Katerina Kolozova describes Laruelle’s position, “how something appears cannot be philosophically predetermined. Reality dictates how we will think and develop entirely new concepts and programmes about what is going on.” In this conversation, David Roden and Bogna Konior discuss the possible intersections between non-philosophy and speculative posthumanism, tackling a variety of topics, including transcendental computers, human agency in relation to modern technology, the body, biomorphism, and pain, dark phenomenology, and how both non-philosophy and Roden’s work diverge from other contemporary approaches to posthumanism.
Contemporanea A Glossary for the Twenty-First Century, 2024
Exonet, not internet.
Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, 2023
[email bogna@nyu.edu for full copy] As debates around artificial intelligence discourses beyond... more [email bogna@nyu.edu for full copy]
As debates around artificial intelligence discourses beyond the West draw
increased attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe
remains a neglected territory. Due to only recent entry of Eastern European
scholars into a discipline formalized in the United States in the 1970s, and
because of constraints on intellectuals and scientists under Soviet rule,
debates in Eastern Europe that prefigure some of the contemporary
discussions in media studies are often unknown. In this chapter, looking to
expand the canon of media theory and philosophy, I investigate the
allusions to AI in Summa Technologiae, a unique work at the intersection of
philosophy and popular science published in 1964 by Polish intellectual
and science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Though neither ‘artificial
intelligence’ nor ‘media studies’ were established terms at the time, Lem’s
futurology, focusing on the relationship of technology to human cognitive
capacities and evolutionary trajectories, anticipates discussions around
possible models of AI. I introduce Summa and contextualize it within the
Polish intellectual scene at the time, which uniquely combined Catholic
theology with cybernetics. I also put forth my reading of Lem’s imagination
of AI as a ‘gnostic machine:’ an evolutionary, existential technology that
operates at the limit of human comprehension.
Redacted , 2021
Planetary state change is narrated as an invasion by technologies alien to our human logic of sex... more Planetary state change is narrated as an invasion by technologies alien to our human logic of sexual reproduction. But humans are increasingly also reproducing by converting biomass into artifice, not unlike what nanobots are imagined to do..
Post-Memes (Punctum Press) , 2019
'While apocalyptic memes can be explained by the medium’s inherent—often ironic—humor, they are a... more 'While apocalyptic memes can be explained by the medium’s inherent—often ironic—humor, they are also the evidence of grappling with the insufficiency of politics at this moment of perceived crisis. Some express panic about civilizational decline, some joke about doom becoming our status quo. Others still wrestle with abstraction and, perhaps unwillingly informed by the possibility of actual extinction in the era that has been called the Anthropocene, challenge the idea of sufficient human agency. Dehumanization, anonymity, and doom are symptomatic not only of what the current (Western) political sphere on the Internet styles itself to be, but also of a larger shift in experiencing the inefficiency of human politics.'
EastEast, 2020
Did aliens visit Poland? How good was Victor Hugo at geopolitics? Why did the Irish locate the mo... more Did aliens visit Poland? How good was Victor Hugo at geopolitics? Why did the Irish locate the moon in Eastern Europe? What brought together Poles and Haitians? Through childhood memories, lesser known histories, mythological conspiracies, and theoretical physics, Bogna Konior explores the complex entanglement of dreams and actualities that makes up a nation. Text here: https://easteast.world/en/posts/130
Flugschriften , 2020
'The dark forest theory of the internet is about the risk tied to the very passport we need to en... more 'The dark forest theory of the internet is about the risk tied to the very passport we need to enter our everyday cyberspace: communication, screening the self, telling the truth about ourselves, revealing or concealing our coordinates. It is not a winning game plan or a blueprint for “change”, but a description. Web 2.0 rests on two axioms. First, sociality is a primary human need, communication is necessary for survival. Second, sociality is the carrier of all human conflict. More sociality, more entropy. Our nervous systems cannot distinguish between sociality and survival, and so we are sentenced to each other. The whole internet has been dealt that dead hand.'
Undercurrent, 2020
Machines, aliens, Octopolis, aquaforming, industrial cephalopods prosperity, interspecies enginee... more Machines, aliens, Octopolis, aquaforming, industrial cephalopods prosperity, interspecies engineering. For Alice dos Reis' show 'Undercurrent.'
New Formations , 2022
Written in 2015 (!), when I was obsessed with ontological turn, perspectivism, interspecies media... more Written in 2015 (!), when I was obsessed with ontological turn, perspectivism, interspecies media arts, posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and rats.
Abstract: This article considers ‘perspectivism’ as described by Viveiros de Castro and Willerslev as a lens for discussing interspecies media arts. In what way could we think about ‘personhood’ in order for the proposition of ‘nonhuman persons’ to make sense, while escaping the determinism of colloquial anthropomorphism, where humans simply project some idea of themselves onto others? How could this in turn inform our interpretation of interspecies art in urban spaces? The ethically controversial art of Japanese collective Chim↑Pom, who break into Fukushima ‘no-go’ zones, capture and kill rats, and lure flock of scavenger crows out of their hiding spots, creates situations where humans and animals relate to each other within a predatory loop of damage and toxicity; a perspectivism for the era of urban waste. The article further raises questions about the historical context of these artworks: post-nuclear spaces, alien and invasive species, and ‘the Anthropocene.’ Unlike stereotypical ‘green art,’ Chim↑Pom’s work grasps human-animal relationships through the lens of animosity, where personalisation and ethics are rooted in conflict. Reading their art through an unusual parallel with animist hunting practices that form the basis of ‘traditional’ perspectivism, the article reflects on these asymmetrically related but proximate frameworks and the current revival of scholarly interest in animism.
Mapping Crisis Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping, 2020
Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space not time th... more Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us. (John Berger cited in Toscano and Kinkle, 2015, p. 87)
Paradoxa: Climate-Fictions, 2020
[Full paper here: https://bit.ly/3lSbchb Message me for author's copy if needed.] What is climat... more [Full paper here: https://bit.ly/3lSbchb
Message me for author's copy if needed.]
What is climate fiction? Humanities quarrel over the nature of this newly christened genre, pointing to its activist dimensions and pondering its relationship to realism. In this article, I discuss how digital media studies should enter this debate by analyzing climate simulations as a type of climate fiction, one that lies at the core of any subsequent narrative retellings. The status of climate change itself as a simulation signals that by relegating ‘climate fiction’ to a genre, we miss the opportunity to address the larger net of our climate episteme, where fiction operates on multiple levels. I draw parallels between simulated social scenarios in cli fi and simulated scientific scenarios in climate models, and discuss how climate models are like petri dishes for growing fictional Earths in. Rather than cli fi being a ‘retelling’ of what is knowable through ‘climate data,’ I describe how digital climate simulations rely on creating artificial Earths that are worlds unto themselves. It is both through cultural and scientific climate fictions that we model future scenarios. This modelling, a type of ‘fiction’ is in fact the dominant mode of realism with regards to climate change.
Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture and Technology, 2017
How could we reconcile these two ethical and political projects: on the one hand, a desire to see... more How could we reconcile these two ethical and political projects: on the one hand, a desire to seek a politics beyond the existing history of humanism, on the other, a precaution to not fall in line with the violent history that dehumanisation had already amassed? In the Anthropocene, art is often charged with the task of " fictionalising " nature beyond the known and the human; yet in this paper, I propose that it could also produce a science-fiction or a philo-fiction of humanity itself. Looking at various examples of Natalie Jeremijenko's work, I argue that she approximates a politics that does not yet exist: a practice of " generic humanity " in times of interspecies environmental vulnerability. Theorising her work at the intersection of animism and non-philosophy, I label it a non-standard animism, a modelling of governance through non-standard personalisation, which provides cross-species, biometric tools.
Symploke: Theoretical, Cultural and Literary Scholarship, 2019
For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibilit... more For a culture defined by pervasive mediation and unceasing circulation of images, the invisibility of climate change, especially as it relates to the dark bed of the oceans, is unnerving. The oceans are persistently screened: as the human inability to envision large-scale geo-logical politics is laid bare, we are surrounded by ever more innovative machinic eyes. While singular disasters related to climate change produce news events, the ongoing pollution of the oceans does not qualify for live coverage. Is it not surprising that visual culture - from mainstream disaster movies to activist artworks - has taken it upon itself to fill this vacant space of attention. Taking as my case study sculptural installations by Jason deCaires Tylor, which can be viewed underwater or on a screen, in this paper, I theorise a ‘blue’ type of mediation, arguing that durational decay is a trait of oceanic media in the climate change era. This temporal decomposition links blue media to drowned histories that underwrite the Anthropocene, particularly the transatlantic slave trade and the Caribbean aesthetics, where the Atlantic figures as an unmarked grave site. Referring to the work of Zylinska and Kember as well as Väliaho, I argue that as the ocean is increasingly defined by death, the mediation of life becomes necessary in the absence of a live climate change event. Blue media perform their disappearance, thus recalling other disappearances of life in the waters, while they also participate in the neoliberal imperative to capture the productive capacities of life. In their aesthetic decomposition, where disappearance could be revelatory of history, blue media simultaneously perpetuate their own image. These attempts to halt death and decomposition by manipulating its digital referent speak to a larger anxiety as to the finitude of the human, which nevertheless cannot evade its own capture within the neoliberal logic of production.
Speculative Ecologies , 2020
'The self-proclaimed ethical desire to become animal hides another longing: that to become techno... more 'The self-proclaimed ethical desire to become animal hides another longing: that to become technologies. For do we become animals through these virtual reality experiences? Not at all – this is not how the animals see. It is how the technology is configured to see. We ‘become’ technology. We become the eye of the camera. The camera is, however, no longer the mechanic “third eye” that early films theorists such as Dziga Vertov celebrated. The camera is a computer. It renders rather than records.'
_AH Journal, 2019
During the presidential election of 2001, a decade after Poland became independent from the USSR,... more During the presidential election of 2001, a decade after Poland became independent from the USSR, the cyberactivist collective CUKT (Central Bureau of Technical Culture) wrote a “civic electoral software,” which included a presidential candidate called Wiktoria Cukt, a female-presenting, ginger-haired avatar, resembling a glam classical Hollywood actress, wearing an elegant coiffure and a string of pearls.11 The opening of each new electoral headquarters was a mixed media warehouse rave with Wiktoria’s animated physique projected onto the walls. Anyone could submit the postulates they wished for her to represent via an online database. Everything that happened was filmed, digitised and circulated online, while at the same time the collective bought airtime on tv and ran a multi-poster campaign in major Polish cities. Programmed as an amalgamation of her society’s beliefs, she was a cybernetic phantom, an unedited summation of political desires and grievances.
Perrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 2019
If xenofeminism is a platform, a program, a protocol, a tool that can be grasped across its diffe... more If xenofeminism is a platform, a program, a protocol, a tool that can be grasped across its different iterations, it is united by the desire to write the outside in, to undermine what appears natural and therefore lend itself to continued context-dependent use of technology.
Proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art, Hong Kong, 2016
The recently published Xenofeminist Manifesto re-fashions accelerationist politics into radical f... more The recently published Xenofeminist Manifesto re-fashions accelerationist politics into radical feminism. Arguing for a universalist xeno-politics borne out of alienation, xenofeminists see in nature an arch-enemy, aligning with the algorithmical intelligence of technology instead, celebrating artifice and strangeness as the foundation of revolutionary politics to come. In this paper, I argue that nature is but a phantom limb tied to the decaying body of post-Enlightenment modernity. Following the ontological turn in anthropology, I argue that by legitimizing constructed dualisms of nature and technology, xenofeminism fuels the very logic that it seeks to overrun. Enlisting only with nonhumans that it perceives as technological, xenofeminism excludes a number of allies, such as nonhuman animals. Passing beyond the limits of this nature/culture dualism could open xenofeminism up to a full spectrum of nonhuman confederates and lay foundation for speculative aesthetics for all alien subjects.
Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, 2017
With the publication of The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (2011), which f... more With the publication of The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (2011), which famously included only one female contributor, the focus on existence beyond the faulty correlation of ontology and epistemology asserted itself as the focal point of philosophical inquiry. When the spider spins its web, it weaves some of the lines from the center outward—these are called radial. Threads that go around are called orb lines. To the speculative turn, feminism is not a radial line, something that extends from within the centre, but an orb. It is an act of enclosure as revealing: those who proclaimed speculation were too busy weaving their webs to see that they already lived inside an insect colony.
Cyberfeminism is an occult form of warfare. It understands about ‘cyberspace’ what Cixin Liu’s ‘d... more Cyberfeminism is an occult form of warfare. It understands about ‘cyberspace’ what Cixin Liu’s ‘dark forest’ theory understands about the cosmos: all existence is determined by hostility and so the highest form of intelligence lies in occluding one’s coordinates. The hypothesis explains why the universe, statistically full of life, is dead silent. It is not because, as is commonly thought, life has not found a way to communicate, but because it understands that silence is the most advanced form of intelligence. Our physical and virtual spaces, which are increasingly inseparable, are alike a dark forest, where every step must be taken with care, as revealing one’s existence portends annihilation. The most desirable skill, the most coveted trick, and the most longed for disposition can only be this—a fluency in the trading of secrets. The skills we need to strategically deploy concealment, de-concealment and re-concealment.
Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, 2020
As David Roden writes, “a biomorphic posthumanism is no longer about the human relation to the fu... more As David Roden writes, “a biomorphic posthumanism is no longer about the human relation to the future... It is the insurgency of an Outside... We have no transcendental access to this ‘doll space’ prior to making it.” Similarly, as Katerina Kolozova describes Laruelle’s position, “how something appears cannot be philosophically predetermined. Reality dictates how we will think and develop entirely new concepts and programmes about what is going on.” In this conversation, David Roden and Bogna Konior discuss the possible intersections between non-philosophy and speculative posthumanism, tackling a variety of topics, including transcendental computers, human agency in relation to modern technology, the body, biomorphism, and pain, dark phenomenology, and how both non-philosophy and Roden’s work diverge from other contemporary approaches to posthumanism.
![Research paper thumbnail of Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act (2018) [On the Self-Immolation of Piotr Szczęsny]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/58806027/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 2018
Piotr Szczęsny set himself on fire in protest of the Polish government in October 2017. Charged w... more Piotr Szczęsny set himself on fire in protest of the Polish government in October 2017. Charged with political orientation, his self-immolation posed a challenge to the news media, forcing it deep into the gutter of suicide archive, where commentators debated appropriate aesthetics of protest in a country whose imagery is predominately thanatic; in a nation-state that has been resurrected after its many occupations yet still remains within a sacrificial grave, with death as the cornerstone of community. In this article, I situate Szczęsny’s death within the nightmare-bound post-Soviet political scene through historically contextualizing the debate around his suicide, where the act itself was criticized on the basis of its inappropriate aesthetics of irrational self- harm. I argue that such binding of a/political catastrophe in a bundle of representations corresponds to what François Laruelle calls media intellectualism, a form of engaging suffering that relies on its mediation. Seeking an alternative discourse of engaging the a/political act, I look to Katerina Kolozova’s non-standard politics of pain and to Oxana Timofeeva’s work on “the catastrophe.” These positions, which I call stances of the unsubject, offer us different starting points for creating solidarity in spaces of void, pain and depression. For the unsubject, pain is the prerequisite for forming the political, albeit in a non-standard manner, where politics cannot oscillate around representations, ideologies or identities. Rather than mediate self-immolation, I ask whether the way that we define “the political” could benefit from a subtraction of mediation, from a catastrophic thinking in parallel with the brutality of the real, rather than the repetition of (national) trauma.
Alienist Manifesto Magazine , 2020
When we enter into the simulated Americas that we’ve taken to call social media, are we entering ... more When we enter into the simulated Americas that we’ve taken to call social media, are we entering into a modern gothic quarter, where the mundane becomes horrific, and every exit is a dead end? What’s there creeping behind the walls if not ghosts, of ourselves and others, past versions of our thoughts and stillborn selves, monstrous clones, living their own lives in the dark?
Whole issue here: https://alienistmanifesto.wordpress.com/2020/12/20/alienist-9/
Agosto Foundation , 2020
Link: https://agosto-foundation.org/mediateka/speculative-ecologies/thinking-the-pandaemic
Flugschriften, 2019
Being in love with black holes, obsessing over Solaris, large ocean eddies & why we can't find al... more Being in love with black holes, obsessing over Solaris, large ocean eddies & why we can't find aliens. For the Institute of Incoherent Geography.
![Research paper thumbnail of Envenoment, an Excavation: Towards a Feminism-without-example [PINTHW] (2017)](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/56731096/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](What if we think the foundational epistemology of philosophy not through the metaphor of light bu... more What if we think the foundational epistemology of philosophy not through the metaphor of light but through the immanence of darkness and venom?
<Envenoment, take 1> thinks through the serpent ancestor politics of feminism-without-example in order to lay the foundations for this possibility.
Powerpoint & notes originally presented at Western Sydney University, July 2017. Video originally presented and performed at Tuning Speculation IV in Toronto, November, 2016.
[Italian translation of 'Alien Aesthetics: Xenofeminism and Nonhuman Animals'. By lesbitches http... more [Italian translation of 'Alien Aesthetics: Xenofeminism and Nonhuman Animals'. By lesbitches https://lesbitches.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/estetica-aliena-xenofemminismo-e-animali-non-umani/]
Introduzione Ibrido recente di femminismo e accelerazionismo, lo xenofemminismo rappresenta la più eclatante insorgenza cyber e tecnologicamente orientata della teoria femminista contemporanea dai tempi del famoso Manifesto Cyborg di Donna Haraway e del lavoro di Sadie Plant presso l'Unità di ricerca sulla cultura cibernetica negli anni Novanta. Insieme alla pubblicazione di dea ex machina (2015), che ripercorre la genealogia dei femminismi che utilizzano lo stato macchinico dell'esistenza contemporanea come proprio banco di prova, lo xenofemminismo mira a recuperare il potenziale liberatorio della tecnologia e dell'alienazione: la libertà di appropriarsi della tecnologia piuttosto che di affrancarsi da essa. All'apparenza, allineando la propria rivoluzione esclusivamente con il dominio tecnologico, lo xenofemminismo prende le distanze dall'ecofemmi-nismo-che di tutti i femminismi è quello che, dal 1980 fino a oggi, ha cercato in maniera più esplicita di realizzare un discorso rivoluzionario riven-dicando la connessione tra donne, animali non umani e ambiente. In questo saggio sostengo che lo xenofemminismo ostacoli il proprio potenziale emancipatorio affidandosi allo stesso dualismo che ha caratterizzato l'ecofemminismo: ovvero, quello che vede natura e tecnologia come entità separate. Fondando la propria teorizzazione in una simile separazione ontologica, incontrastata e universalizzata, lo xenofemminismo restringe la portata della propria apertura metamorfica ed esclude un gran numero di alleat* rivoluzionari*, come ad esempio gli animali non umani.
Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media, and Society, 2015
Dodo Dayao, thankfully, cannot settle his mind on any one thing. He directs, writes erudite film ... more Dodo Dayao, thankfully, cannot settle his mind on any one thing. He directs, writes erudite film criticism, creates installation films [Memories of Places I’ve Never Been, 2009; Entropy Machine, 2011] and comic books [Noisy Blood, 2006) and Askals, 2009]. His oil paintings have been featured in various group exhibitions such as in “2010: The Year We Make Contact.” Before directing his feature-length debut, Violator (2014), the only horror film that screened in the main competition at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival, he co- wrote Khavn’s Philippine New Wave: This Is Not A Film Movement (2010). Over email, we pondered over the state of contemporary Southeast Asian horror, Violator’s complex engagement with horror tropes, and the challenges of filming demonic typhoons. Evocative, sensual, yet frightening, Violator (2014) expands the lines of Southeast Asian horror beyond a typical ghost movie. It revels in attentive, psychological terror and develops its own mythology around one stormy day in the Philippines, mere moments before the typhoon heralds a quiet Apocalypse. As Dodo labels it in this interview, the mood is distinctly “pre-apocalyptic.” Divided into parts meant to complement each other in charting the annals of evil, Violator balances non-linear mood pieces with character development.