Interview by Daniela Silva
Working across AI, hacktivism, and biosemiotics, Helena Nikonole develops a practice that moves between artistic speculation and infrastructural experimentation. Her projects engage with technology not as a fixed toolset, but as a contested space shaped by power, ideology, and the potential for subversion. Rather than stabilising into a single medium or discourse, her work operates through shifting formats that combine artistic research, critical inquiry, and material experimentation.
Helena Nikonole is one of the artists-in-residence at Chrysalis. Artists in Labs, a residency programme by Art Laboratory Berlin that supports collaborations between artists and scientific research environments. Within this framework, Nikonole continues her investigation into machine learning and biosemiotics through direct engagement with laboratory-based research, particularly in microbial ecologies and the metagenomic analysis of soil samples. Her approach does not seek to translate scientific knowledge into artistic form, but to work alongside it, establishing a space where different modes of inquiry can coexist. In this context, biological and computational systems are brought into relation through processes of transformation and co-evolution, situating her practice within a field where scientific and artistic research intersect.
While this residency provides immediate context for the conversation, it also connects to a broader, continuously evolving practice. Nikonole resists disciplinary boundaries, working fluidly between artistic production, research, and curatorial formats. Her involvement in 868labs, a collective focused on decentralised and off-grid communication systems, alongside her research into the ideological structures embedded in large language models, reflects an approach that engages not only with representation but with the infrastructures that shape contemporary conditions of communication, control, and knowledge production. Across these projects, artistic practice becomes a site for both experimentation and critical intervention, addressing the material and political dimensions of technological systems.
Central to her methodology is what she calls the misuse of technology, a method that deliberately pushes systems beyond their intended functions. By engaging with large language models in this way, she exposes the biases and underlying logics embedded within them, revealing how such systems encode specific worldviews and ideological positions. This approach does not seek to resolve technological contradictions but to work through them, making their internal tensions and limitations visible. In parallel, her speculative works propose alternative forms of life shaped by technological and ecological conditions, questioning dominant narratives around intelligence, evolution, and agency, and expanding the conceptual frameworks through which these ideas are understood.
Within the context of Chrysalis. Artists in Labs, these lines of inquiry are further extended through sustained engagement with scientific processes and research methodologies. The residency becomes not only a site of production but also a space for negotiating different forms of knowledge and ways of working, where experimentation unfolds across both artistic and scientific domains. In the following conversation, Nikonole reflects on the political dimensions of AI, the role of artistic research within scientific contexts, and the shifting conditions through which both technology and life itself are continuously redefined.
Your work operates at the intersection of AI, hacktivism, hybrid art, and biosemiotics. What initially drew you to these territories, and how have they evolved within your practice over time?
I like to think about myself as a fluid entity, a kind of trickster who is an artist, a curator, a researcher, doing pretty diverse things: from hacktivism to bio art, from AI to what I’d call an “activist startup” — I mean my 868labs collective. I’m just interested in many things and I don’t want to limit myself.
Actually, I’m also working on a pop music project with a friend and colleague, and we’re planning to publish our first single soon. Talking about how my practice evolved: I remember being pretty disappointed with artistic practices around seven years ago, and feeling like I wanted to drift more towards practices that could also have practical, political, or infrastructural relevance — which is what I’m doing now, both as an artist and as a curator. In addition to 868labs, which focuses on creating alternative means of communication, I’m also working on a new curatorial project, rdcl::tools. The Wau Holland Foundation supports this initiative. We’ll launch our open call soon and plan to fund 10 projects at the intersection of art, technology, and activism.
Much of your work navigates the tension between utopian technological futures and the dystopian realities of the present. How do you position your artistic practice within this spectrum?
I wouldn’t say my work navigates this tension — I’m interested in a multidimensional perspective on technology. As an artist, I oscillate between different positions and approaches: from the practical to the speculative, from the utopian to the dystopian, from the misuse of technology to innovation. And this is a non-binary space, of course, which means that in my practice, these perspectives and approaches coexist, or exist on a spectrum. From my perspective, technology is never only liberatory or only oppressive. It is always structured by power, but also open to appropriation and subversion. My work tries to stay with that complexity rather than reduce it to admiration or critique.
As both an artist and researcher currently pursuing a PhD on LLMs and political ideologies, how does your academic path inform your creative process, and vice versa?
I’m working on an artistic research PhD, so this link is pretty clear. The research does not sit outside the practice as a theoretical frame; it is embedded in it. In this research, I use an approach I call the misuse of technology: I try to push LLMs to their limits, subvert them, deliberately make them glitch—and, through this, reveal their hidden ideological and ethical dimensions and structures. The artistic perspective gives me a certain freedom and versatility, and the research sharpens the artistic process. Sometimes, through conversations with scientists researching AI, I find that we are asking similar questions and, surprisingly, arriving at similar methods from completely different directions.
Decentralisation and off-grid communication are central to your work with 868labs. Do you see artistic practice as a form of infrastructural experimentation or even resistance?
It goes exactly from speculation, artistic imagination, and infrastructural experimentation toward developing tools that can potentially be used for resistance — or for reclaiming privacy in a world of surveillance, or simply as a means of communication in places where mobile connectivity and the internet aren’t accessible. Which today is a reality for many people: from war zones to states like Russia, which has launched a major and fairly successful campaign against internet freedom — fighting VPN services, blocking Telegram (the most popular messenger in Russia), and probably moving toward a great Russian firewall operating on a whitelist-only basis. Or people in Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, Peruvian activists, and so on. This project started from an idea I had a couple of years ago, and it has become increasingly relevant month by month.
Do you see LLM and AI as collaborators or tools?
I actually love the idea of saying “collaborators,” but unfortunately, no. It’s definitely an object of my research, and sometimes certain models have been subjects of my conversations, helpers, advisors, apprentices (sometimes pretty lazy ones), frienemies, opponents, manipulators, gaslighters, sycophants, liars. But assistants and tools first and foremost.
Alongside the residency, you had the exhibition p0wer vect0rs on view at Art Laboratory Berlin. What experience or reflection did you hope visitors would leave with after visiting this exhibition?
This is the most difficult question for me, because I didn’t want to prescribe a single takeaway. p0wer vect0rs is a milestone in an ongoing research process that has already lasted two years, and the subject itself is changing extremely quickly. So, rather than delivering a single, fixed message, the exhibition seeks to create a space for confrontation and reflection. If I hope for anything, it is that visitors leave with a more embodied sense that AI systems are not neutral, and that ideology is not something external to them. It is present in their outputs, in their training conditions, in their patterns of persuasion, in the way they structure language, vision, and interpretation. I also hope the exhibition creates a certain cognitive and emotional dissonance: a feeling that these systems are at once familiar, seductive, and deeply disturbing. For me, that discomfort can be productive.
What’s your chief enemy of creativity?
There are two: pressure and chatbots.
You couldn’t live without…
Without many things. I’m rather ascetic. I sometimes enjoy digital detox, but living without my phone and laptop would feel off. I experience them as prosthetics, like parts of myself, so I never let anyone, literally anyone, touch my phone or laptop; they’re the most intimate parts of myself.
