Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media

Day 1 23:00 Fuse en Art & Beauty

Dec. 27, 2025 23:00-23:40

Fahrplan__event__banner_image_alt Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media

This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. The talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It also 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?

The talk will also introduce an upcoming HackLab initiative — a collaboration-in-progress that brings together artists, hackers, and activists to develop open-source tools for disruption, resilience, and collective agency — and invites potential collaborators to get involved.

Speakers of this event

helenanik0n0le

Helena Nikonole is a new media artist, independent curator, researcher, and educator based between Berlin and Istanbul. Her fields of interest include AI, hacktivism, hybrid art, and biosemiotics. She is the co-founder of 868labs — a Berlin-based collective developing tactical tools for decentralized, off-grid communication. 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. She is currently pursuing a PhD on LLMs and political ideologies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.