2026-05-17 –, BOOL
Language: English
This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. Drawing on case studies such as Antiwar AI and 868labs, the talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It introduces a forthcoming HackLab designed to foster collaborative development of open-source tools addressing digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, propaganda infrastructures, and ideological warfare.
In this talk, media artist and curator Helena Nikonole presents her work at the intersection of art, activism, and tactical technology — including interventions into surveillance systems, wearable mesh networks for off-grid communication, and AI-generated propaganda sabotage.
Featuring projects like Antiwar AI, the 868labs initiative, and the curatorial project Digital Resistance, the talk explores how art can do more than just comment on sociotechnical systems — it can interfere, infiltrate, and subvert them.
This is about prototypes as politics, networked interventions as civil disobedience, and media hacks as tools of strategic refusal. The talk asks: what happens when art stops decorating crisis and starts debugging it?
Helena Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator based in Berlin. Her fields of interest include AI, hacktivism, hybrid art, and biosemiotics. One part of her practice is dedicated to utopian scenarios of a post-human future and art as innovation, while another focuses on the dystopian present and a critical approach to technology.