Ever feel like you are being consumed by the AI data munching overloads of big tech? Ever feel guilty, or at least ambivalent, about test-driving the contours of ChatGPT? This essay, featuring emoji’s superficial chatbot outputs and questions about the in-betweens of speculative and tangible, otherwise of how to side-step the technological tentacle, leaves even the authors wanting more depth.

This article is an interweaving of situated dialogues, critical reflections, and expanded knowledges through the lenses of «not knowing in the presence of» (as per Marisol de la Cadena’s essay of 2021) gardens and chacras, and kitchens of steel and earth in Cusco, Peru and Basel, Switzerland. Centring four seasons of exchanges with Isaac Riquelme Mamani (mi querido maestro/my beloved teacher), we look at a recipe, ritual, and seasonal gathering rooted in Peruvian Andean food culture through the Pachamanca (a traditional dish which means comida y ritual bajo la tierra or «pot/meal underneath the earth» in the language of Quechua Runa Simi). In the middle of writing my PhD (which feels more like indigestion) and enacting consent processes, I began to make sense of how Pachamanca and the values and technologies of collective food practices could hold the space to rehearse situated and regenerative relationships with land. So, how and why to cook with land(-scape)? I don’t know, but I can rehearse it…

Spot, the yellow four-legged robot dog manufactured by Boston Dynamics, and its canine lookalikes, have become increasingly ubiquitous in daily life. It patrols and surveils university campuses, parks, and neighborhoods under the auspices of safety and innovation. Many are not fooled by this narrative and, in response to its presence, have taken Spot’s removal into their own hands. The following text is a set of speculative abolitionist scenarios constructed by reappropriating the Boston Dynamics User Guide for Spot and shifting it into a manual of sabotage to be used instead against this carceral technology.

Mona Hedayati’s experimental visual essay combines strands of technical critique, poetic reflection, and embodied experience to challenge how biometric data is captured, integrated, and interpreted. Drawing on her ongoing artistic research with biosensor wearables—devices that record physiological data such as pulse rate, skin perspiration, and temperature—the artist resists the reductive narratives of «affective computing»: a field that seeks to translate bodily signals into legible emotional states like fear, joy, or sadness.Rather than using data to identify or decode emotions, Mona Hedayati unsettles the presumed objectivity and universality embedded in technical systems, yet follows the technical steps of capturing bodily data to a certain extent. She uses the processed data to generate an acoustic environment as a way of subverting the technical logic while also creating a possibility to feel these signals as sonic intensities. Responding to the physiological signals as entangled and messy acoustic accounts, the artist combines digital images with experimental writing to reveal where this transformation fails from the complexity of bodily processes informed by lived experience to universal emotions. Underscoring the contradiction between these two perceptions, her essay juxtaposes technical descriptions of biometric data processing with autobiographical accounts of her experience as a migrant. In contrast to fixed categories of universalised emotions, the fragmented vignettes allow for a multiplicity of affective states to surface, showcasing how the artist’s body responded to displacement in strange ways long before she could cognitively process these sensations as emotions. Concentrating on the gap between what is rendered technically legible and what is felt but illegible, Mona Hedayati’s essay mobilises Hortense Spillers’ concept of the «flesh.» Spillers discusses the flesh as a construct that is distinct from the socio-cultural constitution of the body, particularly in the juxtaposition of white body against Black flesh subjected to racialised violence, as flesh bears the marks and gives evidence of what it has gone through. Flesh, in this sense, refers to a pre-subjective, pre-coded body that registers the world not through cognition but through sensation. In Mona Hedayati’s textual fragments, flesh operates as a conceptual device that underscores the embodied residue of political and personal histories. As a state prior to a socially and ideologically legible body, flesh resists the reduction into fixed categories and stereotypes. In mobilizing the concept in relation to the main character of the essay, it shifts the protagonist’s pronoun from «she» to «it»—«she» referring to a gendered culturally-stable, politically-positioned subject who is intelligible within social frames; «it» marks a return to the biological sensorium as a reactive system driven by what it has somatically registered, long before those sensations are rendered intelligible or sayable.The fragmentary vignettes are hence rupture points, sites where the flesh interrupts the technical workflow. The flesh does not fit in the logic of computation. It glitches the system to reclaim the right to remain undetectable, a refusal to be parsed emotionally.

The year is 2025 and the Internet is dead. Bots dominate cyberspace, which has transformed into a lifeless network of these automated clickers. Bots write by and for the bots, mimicking human clicks, feeding an endless cycle of data production and mining, generating targeted ads and toxic tweet waste. In this critical synthetic fiction, the border between bots and humans is blurred. Together with bots, we break the Internet forming underground networks free from algorithms, on foot they forge subversive desire paths to rewrite their future collective code.

How to write a design history that navigates in between material and body politics? By trying to find articulations in a mountain of words unspoken this project explores translations of disciplinary literacies between scientific and artistic/design practices. An ambivalent endeavor that challenges perspectives on crystalline matter.

Even though the critical inquiry into climate sciences by feminist scholars and art practitioners (among others) is well-established, it still seems to trigger controversies, accusing this discourse of relativizing scientific knowledge. At a time when world leaders are climate deniers, this text seeks to negotiate with other ways of thinking with the Earth by decentering climate practices from an exclusive (hard) scientific rationalization. 

As this article shows, Russia mimics the methods of normalizing colonial occupation and resource extraction practiced by other empires while insisting on its uniqueness. A close reading of the exhibition «Russia» at the All-Russian Exhibition Centre allows for a deeper understanding of the intersections between visual culture and the material infrastructures of settler-colonial occupation. Most recent transimperial collaboration between USA and Russia rendered Ukraine and Russia-occupied Indigenous lands as resources. This article looks at the ways, extractive perspectives and narratives, are developed within Russia.

Shocking Periphery aims to construct a «potential history» of Poland’s reintegration into international capital markets after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It rejects the implementation of the post-1989 liberal economic shock therapy, carried out under Margaret Thatcher’s infamous slogan «There is no alternative» (the TINA hypothesis).

This article seduces the rigid logics of computational imaginaries with crip intimacies, by performing cron jobs as chronic jobs and transforming system maintenance into acts of crip care beyond chrononormativity. Presented as a code repository, it offers a crip critical approach to computational time with a chaotic mix of crip time and cyberfeminist net-art.

This text is a recount of exploring the algorithmic intricacies of hovering interactions on YouTube video thumbnails. The explorative debugging practice used offers a glimpse into the material implications of hovering, seeing it as a form of exploited labor. Each hover activates a convoluted set of instructions resulting in hardcoded values for what is considered productive and unproductive hovering.

The institutional archive as a vessel for historical Black British sonic histories is one of precarity, absence and loss. Its failures are the catalyst for communal gatherings and the expansion of alternative research activisms such as the DWN (Decolonising Wikipedia Network), collectively using Wikipedia to reframe and add to the database under the «lens of anti-racism and decoloniality.»

Figures of speech are a tongue’s gift to the excessive. Some languages rely on this gift enough to turn its usage into an addiction, speakers into addicts, and poetic metaphors into national history. Consider this: is it possible to argue against metaphors—or some other linguistic devices like analogies or similes—without resorting to the thing itself, in some shape? If we can’t stop shaping (and figurating) or stage-designing with words, there can be no incorrect way to formulate such figurations. This is an appeal to use it all gloriously wrong.

One day, walking in the streets of Milan, the Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes happens upon an Italian translation of Il Guarany. The love story between an indigenous warrior and the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman seemed a perfect plot for a new opera, aligned with the imperial desire for compelling national narratives and the European fascination for everything exotic. But what the maestro didn’t know is that going back in time can have consequences, and together with the sixteenth characters he evoked, other forces came into play.

Scientific research and its communication are usually forced into a mold to be considered rigorous. How can poetry serve as a healer, to mediate between the cryptic language of academia and the rest of the world? «Closed Surveillance Circuit» merges poetry with an essayistic approach, exploring themes such as hardware, software, image theory, the obsolete natural-artificial binary, and the experience of life mediated by contemporary technological devices. The poems were originally published by the Barcelona-based publishing house Cielo Santo in 2024.

In this conversation, the editors of the journal issue «Imagination as a Site of Struggle» reflect on intersectional writing on art, media, and technology, thinking through ways of transgressing academic writing. Based on their respective backgrounds and practices, they discuss weaving together creative modes of critical knowledge production and engagement to look beyond the content of the writing to the practice of writing itself.