Op & Ed
Reflections on Iklectik, events at a car park, current venue ecosystem & models
Text by Atay Ilgun PARKS is a new recurring live programme at IKLECTIK, London. Well-settled into their new home in Peckham Levels, the independent cultural platform has evolved into more than a ‘gig space’, becoming an Art Lab that shapes a radical, cross-disciplinary approach to culture-making. With PARK, iklectik are
Jaleh Negari’s ‘ما به هم می رسیم | We Reach Each Other’, the self as a project & as an unfinished one
Text by Robert Barry From a distance, Jaleh Negari’s Pattern of Life Analysis II (2025–26) might almost be mistaken for a digital print. You see blocks and shapes in abstract configurations, networks of sky blue rectangles, green dashes and deep orange squares in a field of white space, not a
Feeling Smartly: In the dust motes
Text by Sarah-Jane Field SMART, when applied to devices – phones, home automation hubs, or robot carpet cleaners – connotes complex, algorithmic and seamless functionality. In contrast, smart human behaviour is likely to be exhibited by someone who thinks, feels, and responds beyond expectations, perhaps with originality or intuition, and
Dismantling & reinventing visibility, exploring Jen Liu’s artistic & intellectual process
Text by Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano There is a persistent assumption built into the concept of visibility that being visible means being relevant, accounted for, and enfranchised. But to be seen is also to be exposed, vulnerable, surveilled even. Across an art practice spanning video, painting, sculpture, and archival research, Jen Liu
The Phone Talks Back: A monologue on Shenzhen & the architectures of consumer technologies
Text by Ruba Al-Sweel The following monologue is excerpted from ‘Plastic Pilgrims’ (2025), a film by Ruba Al-Sweel, which is written from the perspective of a stolen and resold phone. The monologue narrates the phone’s journey from Shenzhen (colloquially mythologised as the world’s graveyard for stolen iPhones and electronics) and,
FIBER Festival 2026 – The day after: A single drop can change the course of a river
Text by Hannah van den Elzen We are living in turbulent times. The present feeling haunted by catastrophe: genocide, ecocide, the violence of Big Tech, and the unsettling experience of watching things fall apart in real time. “A single drop can change the course of a river”, a phrase spoken
Bienal Climática, exploring industrial memory & ecological futures in Avilés, Spain
Text by Belén Vera During the last decade, climate crisis has gradually shifted from being a recurring subject within contemporary art to becoming one of its main conceptual and curatorial infrastructures. Today, it feels almost impossible to imagine a biennial, museum programme or international art festival that does not engage,
Concatenations, on computation, intrinsic knowledge & grains of sand
Text by Sabina Oțelea Could a grain of sand be investigated independently of its encompassing totality? Could its origin be traced, its future mapped? The friction between a grain of sand and a small infinity of others can be best understood experientially. A small infinity is a number far greater
Multi-Agent worlding, reimagining narrative beyond systems
Text by Joey Holder Social media platforms have become the primary infrastructure of public discourse, increasingly shaped by AI-driven systems whose logic operates beyond public scrutiny. Recommendation algorithms sort and amplify content not toward shared understanding but toward engagement, collapsing distinctions between signal and noise, representation and effect, producing a
Technologies of Meaning: Navigating INDEX Biennial of Art & Technology 2026
Text by Dom Stevensson There’s a particular joy to walking through Braga. Its compact streets and layered architecture encourage a slower mode of attention, recalling the Situationist dérive, where wandering through urban space becomes a way of forming new relationships with thought itself, allowing ideas and observations to emerge gradually
The hills grew organs: Three views of posthuman Appalachia
Text by Eddie Lohmeyer Field Report [03.001]: Post-Appalachia The following transcript and field observation serve as the initial entry in an ecological survey [03.001] of Appalachia. Time: atemporal, non-existentCoordinates: indeterminate, nonlocal, dispersed across strata I refer to this region as post-Appalachia, though it has held many names over the seasons.
tekhnē x CLOT Magazine: Of underground frequencies, hidden infrastructures & the material life of sound
Text by Irem Erkin Materia Prima, in Latin ‘raw matter‘ or ‘first material,’ is the theme of the second issue of Tekhnē journal. Materia Prima refers, in this issue’s context, to the physical materials such as metals, minerals and electronic components that form the foundation of sound technologies. Rather than
The Day After – L.E.V. Gijón at twenty, a festival as a reading of its territory
Text by Jacobo García There is a building in Gijón that has experienced several lives. A Francoist vocational school, an emblem of post-industrial reconversion, a regional cultural complex. A heritage site declared BIC (Asset of Cultural Interest) in 2016 and added to Spain’s UNESCO Indicative List in early 2025. La
Who gets to enter the interface? On VR immersion & access
Text by Tuçe Erel Recent curatorial practices in art, science, and technology increasingly foreground questions of mediation, accessibility, and public engagement, yet their outreach often remains limited to already-specialised audiences. Medium- and large-scale exhibitions started to rely on technologically complex, immersive formats that unintentionally reproduce barriers to access, engagement, time,
Against the Experiment, exploring ten years of Backslash at Cornell Tech (Part 2)
Text by Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano In the first part of this article, I discussed the origins and evolution of Backslash at Cornell Tech, from its early incarnation as ArtFoo to its current identity as a program that pairs artists with technologists to produce finished, exhibition-ready artworks. I traced how the program’s
Technological Necropolitics, who gets to live & die online
Text by Jonathan Stein The banality of evil is now a well-known concept, developed by philosopher Hannah Arendt, to express how ordinary people can commit grotesque, inhumane acts. What she forgot to mention is that sometimes the worst instances of it take place in the US Patent and Trademark Office.