chapter

Program Day 2

Thursday, June 25, 2026

10:00-19:00

@ OT301 & Online

9:30 am 🔓 Doors open

10.00 - 12.00 (Studio & Online) 🎤

SessionMapping the Current Net Culture Condition

With: Vladan Joler, Rosa Menkman, Lesia Kulchynska, Cade Diehm, Miriam Rasch, Silvio Lorusso

Chair: Geert Lovink

In this panoramic session we bring together six grand theorists, critics and artists we all love and admire. Over the years they have been linked to the Institute of Network Cultures and will present their current research. The Exit Fest celebrates their urgent investigations, which are both critical and speculative, political and aesthetic, dealing with both the deep and superficial, pop and obscure aspects of today’s digital condition. What brings them together is that they all inquire digital forms of power.

↓ Talk Descriptions ↓

PresentationProbabilistic Anarchism​: Tactical Unpredictability, Invisibility, and Resistance

Vladan Joler

Highly speculative and post-practical social tactics and strategies for the age of AI-techno-totalitarianism. This ongoing, still-raw project investigates how invisibility might be redefined within systems that no longer rely on simple surveillance, but on continuous learning, prediction, and adaptation. It develops a series of practical and post-practical tactics, drawn from art, mathematics, logic, signal processing, and philosophy, that aim to destabilize these systems from within.

PresentationImage Type Charades!

Rosa Menkman

Images are non static objects, that may be redefined many times, across versions, systems, formats, platforms, and use, before they reach an audience. As a result, contemporary image theory has been expanding its vocabulary for these image types coined by artists as well as theorists: technical images, operational images, poor images, platformed images, synthetic images, invisible images, algorithmic images, to name just a few. Some image types name genres, others describe modes of circulation, while others define images according to the technical, cultural, or institutional conditions in which they appear. Consequently, these terms may be used to describe the same image, but will understand it as entirely different objects because they use different theoretical or descriptive work. The proliferation of image types, each coined to refer to a specific meaning, possibility and compromise, signals an deficit in contemporary image theory.

PresentationDream manifesting war machine

Lesia Kulchynska

Is there anything in common between esoteric practices of dream manifesting, the platform economy, and military violence? In my talk, I will speculate on the death drive as a governing principle of the image-based platform economy. Departing from the triangular relations of desire, lack, and image, I will reflect on how the proliferation of desire-charged images breeds apocalyptic fantasies, devastates reality, and encourages self-destruction, and how the war industry thrives in this environment.

PresentationStep Into the Para-Real

Cade Diehm

Once in a lifetime, the water flows underground and the house you are standing in turns out not to be your house. You wake to daily, unthinkable, accountability-free atrocities powered by men who used to be podcasters, shitposters and crypto billionaires. As they plant a Palantir flag on the ruins and call it the future; you reach for your allies and close your hand on dust. And you may ask yourself: how did I get here? You got here because at the moment the internet went fully mask off, the organisations that promised they were your allies went down like a house of cards. After a seven-year research programme at New Design Congress (2018) that anticipated the present, Cade’s current and future work is framed squarely in the Para-Real—a condition in which digital interface and material reality collapse into each other until the border between them stops holding, and the two begin bruising each other’s bodies. His R&D Lab Para-Real Ltd. (2025) is a hardened ‘exilic’ post-institution, built to confront the gap between what is said to be happening and what is actually happening in the brittle digital society. There is no separating the digital from the real. We have all been made to step into the Para-Real. When the servers go dark, what and who survives is determined by who built what. Cade’s work rests on a single thesis: there are exits everywhere, but you must build them yourself.

PresentationWhat is it like to be a “user”?

Miriam Rasch

Enter ghosts. It’s no secret that our every move and (e)motion, and many of our thoughts too, are snared in, chopped up, sold on, and discarded. Tracking technologies are both too big and too boring to think about, ubiquitous and cold as they are. Among the systems (and their critiques), it’s difficult to feel like a person anymore. But who is on the receiving end? What is it like to be a “user”? - one of the worst words in internet parlance, as bad as the “humans are algorithms”-meme. Once you know, you can start to figure out what it means to be something else. For this, I turn to a first-person view and draw on the philosophical concept of experience. This adds an ethical and even a sensual dimension to questions that are usually approached primarily from systemic, political, or economic perspectives. Who gets to experience - that strange interplay of doing something and being done - and what?

PresentationPoor Media: An Exit Strategy

Silvio Lorusso

In this presentation, Silvio Lorusso will interrogate his personal history of publishing experimentation, intertwined with that of the Institute of Network Cultures, against the backdrop of a media environment where doomscrolling, slop and propaganda reign supreme, and where the weird has been all but normalized. What can some cheap, artistic print-on-demand books tell us about the automatic churning of politically polarized bait content?

13.00 - 14.30 (Studio & Online) 🎤

SessionStreaming Vortex: Video, Publishing and Tactical Media

With: Andreas Treske, Michael Dieter, Antonia Hernández, and Konfluxus Collective

Chair: Tommaso Campagna and Jordi Viader Guerrero.

Online video has moved from being a discrete media form to becoming an inescapble condition of daily life. Long and short form video are now the mediatic building block of the internet, shaping how we learn, publish, gather, remember, work, and organize, but also how we coceive and build inrfatructures and practices for digital communication. If the web is built on text (code), this text is nevertheless written to store, process, and distribute moving images that, in turn, bring about diverse practices of production and spectatroship. This panel asks how can we study and use online video critically as a publishing and tactical tool once the social internet is understood as large-scale audiovisual infrastructure.

↓ Talk Descriptions ↓

PresentationDwelling in the Videosphere

Andreas Treske

We are not watching the videosphere. We are dwelling inside it, blindly, by default. The only question is whether we build the conditions for conscious dwelling or keep breathing until there is nothing left to breathe.

PresentationPoor Chroma

Michael Dieter

StreamArt updates histories of video art, tactical television, feedback and liveness, and confronts the processing of culture into measurable signals by late platformism. In this presentation, I follow the stream through the interface gates of the corporate stack into phases of capture, mixing, chroma-keying, compression and laddering. How are bodies, rooms, images and enunciations technically treated by these optimized systems? What imaginaries can be found in the frayed edges of the live composited glitch and the sacrificial colour green?

PresentationThe Uses of the Alive: Live Streaming as a Playground

Antonia Hernández

Since 1996, when Jennifer Ringley began broadcasting over the early Internet, play (or art, or erotic play) has been a mode of engagement, exploration, and development for live streaming. Approaching play as an experiential event, this presentation highlights its central role in reclaiming live-streaming technologies and practices.

PresentationTactical streaming through the changing political climate of Hungary

Konfluxus

On April 12th, Hungary held its most consequential election that ended Orbán’s 16 year regime. Rather than waiting for the results in isolation, the Konfluxus collective organised a stream art event at Gólya, a co-operated bar and community house at Budapest, gathering locals and artists across borders, including participants who could not travel safely to Budapest in person. In the presentation members of the collective recount their experiences leading up to the election event, what happened during the broadcast and what it revealed about the tactical uses of web-based livestreaming.

13:00 - 14:30 (Cinema) 🎤

SessionPolitics of Digital Sovereignty

With: Gianmarco Christofari, Annalisa Pelizza, Sebastian Giessmann and Klara Debeljak

Chair: Geert Lovink

What can our take on digital sovereignty be? The top-down Brussels policy term has nothing to do with bottom-up organization, distributed agency or autonomy. “Digital sovereignty” is now on the brink of becoming a mere argumentative game of techno-geopolitics and geoeconomy. It is time to reclaim and remake the term in the tradition of MoneyLab! INC blogger Gianmarco Cristofari will open this session and introduce the Latin-American debates on digital sovereignty with a brief genealogy of free software and presenting its various sides, with his main point being PIX, the Brazilian payment infrastructure. Media theoretician Sebastian Giessmann will talk about the Digital Euro and its current political uphill battle, juxtaposing it with its rival consumerist sibling Wero. Are we in need of digital cash any longer? SSTS scholar Annalisa Pelizza will discuss infrastructuring for digital identification as a co-emergence of technologies, new subjects and orders of governance. This reveals a more complex understanding of sovereignty than what is claimed with European sovereignty; one that calls for addition, rather than subtraction. Artist and writer Klara Debeljak is focused on alternatives. For her, infrastructural speculation hope-core can provide options of what to do if audience members prefer not to engage in these top-down regimes, or seek generative ways to think beyond increasingly oppressive gentrification of our lived realities both online and off.

↓ Talk Descriptions ↓

PresentationThe State as Platform? PIX’s Paradox and the Imaginaries of a Public Platform Utility

Gianmarco Christofari

What if the most radical digital infrastructure in the world today was built not by a startup, not by a tech giant, but by a central bank? This paper takes Pix — Brazil’s instant payment system, used by over 150 million people in fewer than five years — seriously as a political provocation: evidence that the state can occupy the foundational layer of the digital economy, expel Big Tech intermediaries, and produce inclusion at a scale that decades of market-led innovation never approached.

Drawing on 25 interviews conducted in Latin America, the paper asks what Pix enables us to think that the dominant imaginaries of the digital economy actively foreclose. Against the Silicon Valley imaginary in which platforms are by definition private, and against the European regulatory imaginary in which the best the public sector can do is constrain corporate power after the fact, Pix proposes a third imaginary: the state not as regulator, not as investor, but as operator.

The paper situates this within the broader struggle over digital sovereignty in Latin America, where the dependency question has never gone away, and where a distinct political tradition — the pueblo in the gramscian sense of the social block of the oppressed — makes possible institutional forms that Anglo-American political imagination struggles even to name. Pix forces us to confront the possibility that the the demand to build public digital infrastructure from above, ahead of consensus, and without democratic design, may be the condition of possibility for emancipation from below.

PresentationInfrastructuring for digital identity as a form of (alleged) European sovereignty

Annalisa Pelizza

Contemporary developments in digital identity and identification reveal as a co-emergence of technologies, new subjects and orders of governance. This also shows a more complex understanding of sovereignty than what is claimed with European sovereignty; one that calls for addition, rather than subtraction.

PresentationThe Digital Euro Showdown: Can MoneyLab Do Politics?

Sebastian Giessmann

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) might as well have been our new media of monetary cooperation. And they still can be, at the least in the case of the Digital Euro. Since 2023, I have repeatedly advocated for real digital cash, financial inclusion and new public payment infrastructure for all of Europe. While we, finally, expect a political decision by the European Parliament in July, the D€ is facing competition from WERO, a pan-European PayPal competitor. Geopolitical claims for monetary sovereignty mix with twisted hopes for digital sovereignty and independence. So what can MoneyLab do next? The Austrians of Ja, Panik might have known it early on: “Dance the ECB, swing die Staatsfinanzen … sing ihnen ihre Melodien, zwing sie zum Tanzen.”

PresentationSpeculative Infrastructures, Outposts in Collapsing Reality

Klara Debeljak

Klara Debeljak will present a meta hope-core publication she recently edited and co-authored titled Speculative Infrastructures, Outposts in Collapsing Reality. The anthology centers on Klara Debeljak’s original concept of “speculative infrastructures,” which she defines as networks and collectives that challenge dominant techno-social systems through creative, real-world practices and imagine new ways of organizing, ownership, and resistance—often from within or alongside existing institutions. Speculative Infrastructures, Outposts in Collapsing Realities weaves examples of autonomous internet and spatial infrastructures as well as speculative and feminist/science fiction perspectives. From DIY publishing practices in Amsterdam to Ramallah, radio initiatives from Vis to Topolò, Klaras presentation contextualizes various forms of resistance against the gentrification of both urban spaces and the web.

14.30-16:00 (Cinema Bar) 🙋🏻

Collective MomentImagining the Internet(s): Meet-up

Hosted by Anya Shchetvina and Nathalie Fridzema

15:00-16:30 (Studio & Online) 📺

ScreeningVideo Archive Jam Session: On Tactical Media and Barricades

Curated by Giovanni Rossetti

Inspired by Filmhuis Cavia VHS Archive Jam Sessions, event participants will introduce and screen archival fragments from VHS and other slighlty more recent media formats, tracing the evolution of tactical media over the past decades through the conceptual framework of the barricade.

16:30 -17:00 (Cinema) 🎭

PerfromanceWeaving Through Screens

Curated by Laura Mrksa and Slutty Urbanism Collective (Letizia Chiappini and Valeria Ferrari)

It is an immersive installation and live performance exploring the entanglement of rest, digital consumption, and algorithmic influence on contemporary attention. Weaving Through Screens explores such relationships, interrogating scrolling and weaving as ways to build interconnectedness, networks of care and collective responsibility. Doomscrolling is a form of productive unrest: it engages our attention and distracts us, collectively contributing to an idiotic machine learning process that feeds a chain of algorithms stored elsewhere, owned by someone else. Conversely, weaving can be seen as unproductive rest; as a manufacturing practice, it creates a tangible web that stems directly from our hands. Weaving is simultaneously producing and waiting; it is inefficient production, as it is slow, ancient and silent. While we are supposed to rest in our beds, our brains, fingers, and eyes are magnetised by devices designed for the incessant consumption and production of data. We consume content and time, rotting in bed, our brains in an endless succession of snapshots of pleasure, entangled in addictive screen behaviour.

We invite the audience to collective doomscroll and enjoy the installation. The performance is meant to delve into concepts, scroll, reflect, and rest in a space of intimacy in which the imaginarium of a bed is mobilised against the productive unrest and constant production of data. The bed is the stage on which scrolling and weaving take place. The algorithm is whispering while the screens are revealing our deepest and secret desires and addictions…

17:00 - 19:00 (Studio) 🙋🏻

Collective MomentINC General Assembly on the Future of INC (Open Discussion)

After 22 years at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the INC will continue as an independent, member-run association. At the Exit Fest, we will have our very first general assembly, which is open to all aspiring members (including researchers, writers, collaborators, and supporters). Join us if you’re interested in being a part of INC’s future, and discuss with us what we should do together moving forward.