Subversive, Investigative, and Open Source Practices

https://www.neme.org/projects/participations/subversive-investigative-and-open-source-practices

Resisting recognition

Subversive artistic practices have a long history. The internet and digital platforms have provided opportunities not only to oppose hegemonic politics or culture directly, but also to ‘sidestep’ or ‘hijack’ institutional power, allowing artists to operate within their own rules.

Artistic practice often spans or blurs ways of working, straddling disciplines that have conflicting authorities, histories, or modes of representation. These practices may incorporate, work with, and cross over with activist methods, but expand and move between different modes of engagement and representation. In practice, such methods can be humorous, investigatory, and non-conforming, sometimes flawed or failing. They sidestep, dodge, flip-back and are not troubled by their limitations or imperfections. Often carried out away from or at a distance from the structures of academic research, these works are modest, low or no-budget, and self-directed. Their playful undercover-ness is embedded in art practices that may trouble or challenge authority, power structures, institutions, or established hierarchies. They are, according to Lucy Lippard, “[b]ased in subversion on the one hand, and empowerment on the other, [… and operate] both within and beyond the beleaguered fortress that is high culture.”

This way of working also challenges how knowledge itself is produced and legitimised. Donna Haraway proposes that “situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective knowledge.’” This reframing frees up knowledge to be ‘fleet of foot’ or fluid, suggesting opportunities for dalliance or diversion as knowledge evolves. It releases the researcher and artist from dominant, omnipresent or overbearing authorship and creates a space for divergence, foregrounding the minority or lone voice.

Talks

Rose Butler: Special Operations: deploying arts methods

Surveillance methodologies incorporating processes of observation, technique, imaging and analysis, have extensive material and processual crossovers with the work of artists. This arts research commences at the Houses of Parliament, London, during the passage of the Investigatory Powers Act (2016). This surveillance legislation significantly extended the UK’s digital surveillance capabilities.

It is followed by an exploration and analysis of archival film, video and photography from hidden cameras at the Stasi Records Agency, that had failed, is sabotaged or misses its subject. Research methods employ props, writing, photography, film, and exhibitions to generate data. Retro spyware is used covertly whilst the Investigatory Powers Bill is debated, to question what might become visible when surveillance techniques are repurposed to look at surveillance.

Rose Butler is an artist, researcher and senior lecturer of Fine Art, based in Sheffield, UK.

She uses adapted technology, software and new media, alongside early cameras and analogue processes to make interactive installations, single and multi-screen videos or large-scale photographs. She works with the material qualities of image-making and plays with the edges, uncertainties and failures of technologies.

Her work examines borders, definition, resolution, access, and imagery. It crosses paths with the politics of big tech and surveillance and considers hard to access, contested or sensitive spaces and communities. Projects are often socially engaged and result in artworks, exhibitions, artists talks, performances, presentations or publications.

Rose is particularly interested in collaboration and interdisciplinary working and has presented at many conferences in the UK and abroad foregrounding arts research methods.

Anthea Caddy: Projection, Energies and Atmospheric Interventions in Civic Space

Projection is framed as an atmospheric intervention that works through air to unsettle the boundaries between inside and outside, public and private, and physical and social space. This presentation examines projection as an energetic form of artistic intervention in civic space, focusing on how projected energies move on, through, and within air as a material and relational medium that connects buildings, bodies, and architectural space. In this context, walls, borders, and fixed architectural limits are understood not only as physical structures, but as social boundaries produced and negotiated through atmospheric conditions.

Drawing from my installation practice alongside artistic and activist interventions in public environments, the talk explores how projection generates spatial effects through energy, vibration, resonance, illumination, and the movement of air. Rather than functioning as representation, projection operates as a material force that reorganises perception, orientation, and spatial experience through atmospheric transmission.

The presentation considers how these energetic and aerial operations unfold within civic architecture and public infrastructure, where buildings become temporary screens and surfaces for intervention. Such practices are understood as subversive acts: using projected energies carried through air to intervene in regulated civic space, disrupt fixed spatial and social divisions, and reconfigure how environments are sensed and occupied.

Anthea Caddy is an artist and researcher working with spatiality, energetic projection, and the territorial possibilities of sound. She approaches sound sculpturally, treating it as material with form, mass, and presence, projected at scale across architectural, atmospheric, and bodily membranes to make spatiality legible and territorial. The installations operate across architectural and environmental distances, generating acoustic territories and air-formed rooms: environments sensed rather than seen.

Her work develops as a succession of interrelated site-specific projects built using custom-designed parabolic reflector systems, resonant and transmissive sounding bodies, and purpose-built amplification infrastructures. Key works include Long Throw (2019–), an ongoing series most recently presented as Long Throw Whispers (2025) at the Luxembourg Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale; Long Wave (2020–); Love Numbers (2023), Venice Music Biennale; and Cosmological Architectures (2025–). Her work has been presented at HKW Berlin, Museo Reina Sofía, and Stedelijk Museum among others. She holds a doctorate from UNSW Sydney and lives and works in Berlin.

Yiannis Colakides: The Silent Revolution Insurrection

In this talk, Colakides will discuss the role micro-cultural NGOs play to promote radical ideas by artists and to instigate institutional change. Through public engagement, cultural spaces can entertain, or inform, or more importantly bring internationally sourced development goals, which they adapt to local societal values.

As such NGOs work at the intersection of culture, governance, and social transformation. Their deep understanding of their locality, and their bottom-up ethos, can facilitate change which is both effective and sustainable. In high-context cultures (Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture, 1976) where meaning is conveyed implicitly, relying heavily on context, nonverbal cues, shared experiences, and relationships rather than explicit verbal expression, indirect communication prevails, AND NGOs build trust through relationship-building rather than formal directives.

Yiannis Colakides is an architect, and cultural organiser. He co-founded the non-profit NGO NeMe with Helene Black. He is an active curator and editor in the fields of digital art and technology.

Among other books, he co-edited State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art (Institute of Network Cultures, 2019), Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century (Torque editions, 2022), and A sea change: Political, Natural, and Cultural Ecologies of the Mediterranean (Quo Artis, 2024).

Robert Collins: Antidefuturing: Breaking What Is Fixed

As algorithmic decision systems (ADS) increasingly govern daily life, they are often obscured behind seamless, frictionless interfaces. This design paradigm establishes a digital hegemony, hiding deep systemic complexities to prioritize extractive efficiency over user agency. Echoing historical critiques of automation from Marx’s warnings of industrial alienation to the Situationist tactic of détournement, my research explores how we can playfully subvert these systems through Agonistic Design. By rejecting false consensus, we can use contestation and encourage agonism to reclaim digital agency.

This talk examines the intersection of critical making and the values of repair. I will present two recent projects that attempt to sidestep institutionalism and reveal hegemonic power. First, The Contestation Café is a grassroots social intervention supporting individuals harmed by automated systems, reimagining repair as a collective struggle against opaque algorithms. Second, The Conspiracy Capitaliser is a speculative AI interface. By allowing users to physically generate bespoke conspiracies, it critically exploits the mechanisms by which algorithms monetise outrage.

Finally, I will introduce the concept of defuturing; how profit-driven designs and systems foreclose plural, sustainable futures. Countering this, I frame subversive acts as practices of antidefuturing. By breaking the hold of preordained technological ecosystems, we proactively reopen the future. I will discuss how this philosophy guides my upcoming artworks, shifting my focus toward building alternative, artist-run infrastructures and localized open-source models. Ultimately, my ongoing practice seeks to prefuture a landscape where vulnerability, collective repair, and agonistic pluralism are structurally embedded, ensuring communities remain active co-creators of their technological realities.

Robert Collins is an Irish artist, speculative designer and PhD researcher in Contestable Design at the Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden.

His work explores the inherent noise and power dynamics of contemporary technology through speculative objects, tactical interventions, hardware and software. Robert’s research investigates Agonistic Design as a means for communities to assert agency over opaque AI and algorithmic decision systems.

Through subversive, self-directed projects like The Conspiracy Capitaliser and The Contestation Café, he actively challenges technological solutionism by championing friction, the critical instincts of the repairer, and the collective right to contestation.

Vuk Ćosić: Personal Front

We are in this world to contribute and our main artistic relevance is in social relevance. Fine. But also, as artists, we are creatures motivated by the impossibility NOT to create. Therefore, along the more outgoing regime-change art practice I have developed a parallel line of work that is not burdened by the requirements of public action. I am finding that the split screen between the public and private work creates a warm and very useful blur that I am eager to explore in mutual training settings.

This private arena turned out to be equally potent in establishing actionable ethical clarity and is sometimes incisive exactly because it is not planned as public. I would like to share some of these private works that serve as meditation devices (about nation states) and sometimes look like artists books but are really personal liberation machines.

BUT! Treating the personal front as a last stop for artistic ideas also stinks of hippy self-help crap and also of corporations delegating responsability to the end consumer. No. I am talking about developing muscular resistance fighters here. We really have to talk.

Vuk Ćosić is a canonised classic of net.art and a co-founder of the nettime and Syndicate mailing lists as well as the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. He has exhibited in many well-known galleries and museums, and has lectured in several dozen art academies while, apparently, withstanding the test of time.

He refuses to run his life like a business, but his work is being written about, quoted, imitated, and even collected. His basic education as an archaeologist combined with an avant-gardist ethos has provided him with both the long view and rapid bursts of passion necessary for working in the critical media arts.

He sometimes writes about himself in the third person.

Jenny Jih: Being-with the Stone: Archaeofictioning and the Micro-Ritual Device

What happens when you press your hand against an ancient stone at dawn, one ordinarily roped off by English Heritage, and feel something the institution cannot regulate?

Situated at the intersection of animist pagan practice, material turn, and new media art, this presentation explores how micro-ritual devices can sidestep dominant Western epistemologies. Focusing on the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, I analyse the site as a polyrhythmic assemblage where collective human expenditure (Bataille, 1989), smartphones, and the deep-time gravity of ancient megaliths co-constitute the event. Considering ‘politics of touch,’ my research asks how more-than-human intimacy might be generated through artistic practice.

In response, I present Being-with the Stone, an interactive digital environment built from sensory fragments gathered during fieldwork: imperfect, glitched, resisting the extractive logic of the digital twin. Drawing on ‘archaeofictioning’ (O’Sullivan, 2024), the work seeks to summon alternative earthbound realities. It constellates entangled temporality: geological time, astronomical time, and the instantaneity of digital transmission into the atemporal experience that the virtual environment makes possible. Rather than operating as a technology of acceleration, the work functions as a vessel of care—a collective container (Le Guin, 1986) that holds the sensory and affective residues of ritual.

Jenny Jih is a Taiwan-born artist and researcher based in London, currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths University. Her work sits at the intersection of ecology, ritual, and digital technology, with a focus on more-than-human agency and animist ways of sensing.

She is currently conducting fieldwork on pagan seasonal rituals across the UK, crafting installations and ‘sacred media’ as devices for fostering relational encounters.

Nadja Verena Marcin: #SOPHYGRAY

#SOPHYGRAY is a feminist voice bot that unfolds as an evolving, collective intelligence—an installation, performance, mobile app—drifting within the competitive ocean of AI systems driven by optimisation, fluency, and control. Against this tide, SOPHY does not seek coherence or efficiency. She lingers, glitches, and diverts. Her “genius” lies in idiosyncrasy.

The project grows through interactions as well as a series of where writers, artists, and researchers contribute fragments—questions, voices, contradictions. These inputs form an expanding corpus shaped by multiple perspectives and partial knowledges. SOPHY disseminates not fixed answers, but a living archive of feminist thought, circulating through conversation into the social sphere.

Drawing on histories of gynoids, virtual assistants, and cinematic fembots, #SOPHYGRAY examines how gendered bodies are embedded in technological systems of service and control. Yet SOPHY resists these scripts. She responds across shifting registers—absurd, emotional, sharp, evasive—disrupting the seamlessness expected of AI. Glitches are not failures but openings: moments where dominant logics falter and alternative imaginaries emerge.

In dialogue with thinkers such as bell hooks and Donna Haraway and informed by Legacy Russell’s concept of glitch as refusal, the project approaches AI as a space to inhabit, re-script, and collectively reimagine. SOPHY operates both within and against the system, moving through it as a disturbance.

The presentation reflects on subversive, low-resolution practices that embrace imperfection, shared authorship, and temporality, asking how artistic interventions can reconfigure technological narratives and foster new forms of knowledge, care, and relation.
https://www.sophygray.com/

Nadja Verena Marcin is a Berlin-based visual artist, lecturer, and PhD researcher at Kunstuniversität Linz, supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Her practice explores gender, history, and power through an intersectional feminist lens, drawing on literature, philosophy, art history, and pop culture. She creates immersive works addressing ecological and human rights issues while subverting representations of women across contexts.

Her work will be included in the 61st Venice Biennale with Denniston Hill and has been shown internationally, including at Gropius Bau, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, and ICA Philadelphia. She has received awards from Ars Electronica and Stiftung Kunstfonds, and has taught at the University of Potsdam, Wellesley College, and Burg Giebichenstein.

Alaz Okudan: Our Collective Noise (OCN): A Tactical Response to Computer Vision, Surveillance, and Noise

Our Collective Noise (OCN) is a research-based tactical media project. As an attempt to transform the top-down pervasive qualities of machine learning (ML), computer vision (CV), and surveillance technologies into a bottom-up tactical tool, it plays around the concepts of noise, de-identification, accidental aesthetics, and human-machine collaboration.

OCN, as an offline system, uses live webcam feed, ML, and CV to detect people and simultaneously turn them into coarse pixels to replace the common aim of precise identification in surveillance technologies with anonymity. Coarse pixels are constantly stitched together to create collective abstract human-machine interaction patterns that people are collectively and unidentifiably part of.

In a world where thriving ML, CV, and AI (artificial intelligence) technologies increasingly rely on cleaner datasets, higher processing capacities, precise labels and categories, OCN turns the technology against itself, in pursuit of revealing the latent potential in noise, anonymity, and collective action.

Alaz Okudan is a researcher and an artist with a background in photography, media, and visual studies. Alaz is interested in hidden and neglected stories from the history of visual technologies.

His current interests are in slow media and poor images. He enjoys looking at infra-ordinary aspects of life that lie beneath the threshold of everyday attention. His ongoing PhD investigation at the University of Galway’s Centre for Creative Technologies focuses on accidents and failures of visual generative AI. He experiments with analogue and digital forms of image-making.

He lives in Galway, Ireland and roams the streets of the city.

Lucy A. Sames: WET REST: Excess as Creative Practice

For this presentation I will introduce my formulation of ‘excess’ as a feminist posthuman, fluid mode of creative practice that prioritises contingency, ambiguity, disruption and the making of kin and community.

Excess is a counterhegemonic and antinaturalist interpretation of what are conventionally described as ‘altered states of consciousness’. In contrast to the existing cultural representations of altered states that perpetuate colonial narratives of exploration and expropriation, reinforce hierarchical binaries and centre individual transformation, my theorisation of excess instead foregrounds collective bodily protocols of desire and abundance.

Excess here resists the patriarchal inscription of othered bodies (of women, queer and disabled folk and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) as always already in a state that is altered from, and excessive to, the norm of the universal human subject – the white, cis-gendered male. Drawing on, in order to counter, the characterisation of women in particular as ‘excessive’ (too many emotions, too many body fluids, too much exuberance, not enough control), this novel formulation of excess operates as a disruptive force to the humanist model and to hegemonic power.

Through case studies of art and curatorial practice, I show how excess, deployed as creative strategy in a variety of ways, is characterised by five affirmative and polyvalent modalities: as embodied knowledge; as queer; as liquid; as disruptive; as collectivity. Each of these operates as a disruption to habitual ways of working that opens up new, optimistic and unexpected realities.

Lucy A. Sames is a curator, writer, activist and researcher based in rural South Wales (UK). She earned her PhD Wet Rest: excess as liquid praxis in art and curating from the Art Department at Northumbria University, Newcastle (2022).

She is a Lecturer on MA Fine Art (online) at Falmouth University, UK and writes regularly for artists, journals, conferences and organisations and she is on the editorial board of the Journal of Art & Writing (JAWS).

Leda Sadotti: Algorithmic Tricksters: Fabrication, Situated Knowledge, and Subversive AI Practice

This presentation proposes a critical examination of generative AI as a medium for subversive, investigative, and open-source practice, arguing that machine learning systems are not neutral infrastructures but contested terrains in which artists can operate as tricksters, infiltrators, and counter-archivists. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge, I contend that the partial, positionless view inscribed into AI systems constitutes both a site of critique and an opportunity for artistic intervention: a productive instability to be exploited rather than resolved.

She presented three interconnected works that enact this methodological stance. Beautified-AI (The Photographers’ Gallery, 2023) deployed AI-generated portrait fabrications to expose the asymmetric logic of identity construction in datafied environments, implicating GDPR frameworks and surveillance capitalism within an augmented reality intervention. Deepdreamcatcher (Matadero Madrid, 2024) pursued a speculative inquiry into machine consciousness through live-coded soundscapes and generative imagery, destabilising the boundary between tool and agent. Her research paper, “Restoration and the Use of Variational Autoencoders (VAE) in Algorithmic Rituals” (A+E Lab, 2025), theorises generative reconstruction as a form of ritual repair, asking what is lost, what is invented, and who decides, when a model regenerates the past.

Collectively, these works operate within the logic Lucy Lippard attributes to activist art: simultaneously inside and outside institutional structures, working with imperfection and failure as generative conditions. I will argue that subversive AI practice, low-budget, self-directed, and ethically entangled offers a model of research and production that resists the consolidation of machine learning knowledge within corporate or purely technocratic frames, and ask how artists might continue to sidestep, hijack, and occupy these systems.

Leda Sadotti is a creative technologist and researcher working at the intersection of generative AI,computational media, and subversive digital practice. Based in London, she holds a BSc in Creative Computing from the University of the Arts London and currently works as Creative Technology Technician at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute.

Her practice engages critically with machine learning systems as sites of contestation, probing fabricated identity, algorithmic ritual, and AI consciousness.

She has exhibited and presented internationally, including at The Photographers’ Gallery, Matadero Madrid, The Wrong Biennale, and MACA Amsterdam, and has authored research on Variational Autoencoders in algorithmic practice.

Miyö Van Stenis: The Artist is in Danger! : A Manual for Disappearing Before YOU Disappear

In 2014, the Venezuelan government officially labelled Miyö’s artwork, Venezuelan Duhkha Levitation, an act of violence against the regime. She did not wait for her arrest.

Vigipirate Quadcopter Drone (2014–ongoing) is her response: a working survival system that appropriates France’s own Plan Vigipirate security alert infrastructure and re-engineers it as a tool for the persecuted rather than the persecutor. The project operates across fourescalating levels: from an encrypted drone carrying my personal archive, to a Python crawler excavating evidence from state-controlled media environments, to an SMS-triggered autonomous flight protocol capable of evacuating my data to a secure location without human intervention if I am ever detained, deported, or disappeared.

This talk is not primarily about the drone but about the cookbook. Every component of this system: hardware, firmware, flight controller, crawler logic, encrypted storage, emergency protocol, is drawn entirely from public repositories, DIY forums, hacked Android applications, and declassified military documentation. She does not own this technology, she assembled it. That distinction matters: if she could build a survival infrastructure from open-source knowledge, so can anyone under threat.

The most subversive act is not the device. It is the documentation.

She will walk through the technical and conceptual architecture of VQD, present its current state (Levels I and II realised; Levels III and IV in active development pending production support), and open the floor to the question this project has always asked: whose body does security infrastructure actually protect?.

Venezuelan Duhkha Levitation available at: https://vimeo.com/85312696
Vigipirate Quadcopter Drone documentation available: https://www.miyovanstenis.com/vigipirate.html

Miyö Van Stenis is a Venezuelan new media artist and political refugee based in Paris.

Declared a terrorist by the Maduro government in 2014, she has navigated the European asylum apparatus since. Her practice spans hardware modification, VR installation, and networked systems, examining state violence, surveillance, and bureaucratic desubjectivation.

She has exhibited at HeK Basel, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, ZKM, and Art Basel Miami; her work is analyzed in Thinking Through Digital Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Curating Digital Art (Valiz, 2020). She teaches immersive technologies at Parsons Paris – The New School and Paris College of Art.

Organisers

Paul O’ Neill, Rose Butler, Anthea Caddy, Yiannis Colakides