ABOUT

Bogna Konior is a researcher focused on emerging technologies. She is Polish, currently based between Ukraine and China, where she is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai’s Interactive Media Arts department, and is affiliated with the AI and Culture Center.

She grew up in Wałbrzych, Poland, and graduated from a school run by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a religious congregation founded by the 19th-century Polish Catholic mystic Marcelina Darowska.

Drawing on the intellectual traditions that have shaped her life, from Catholic theology to Eastern European and East Asian histories and cultures, she often returns to overarching questions in her work: How do humans encounter something larger than themselves? What might nonhuman forms of intelligence or agency be like? How can we think about what exists beyond human concepts, perception, or experience? How does technology transform human civilization, and how do people find meaning during large-scale technological paradigm shifts? Finally, how can we draw on older traditions—from philosophy and theology to the arts, or the national cultures that we grew up with—to face the deeper questions that new technologies pose to us?

She is the author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025), which draws on the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to build an original theory of the internet and AI as a first-contact scenario. She is also co-editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025), which reconstructs AI’s intellectual history through Chinese thought and brings its present culture and philosophical traditions into dialogue with contemporary debates.

She is currently developing two projects: one draws on 20th-century Polish and Ukrainian intellectual history to propose new conceptual and strategic designs for AI and emerging technologies; the other is a multimedia project exploring female Christian mysticism as an early philosophy of the internet and AI.

In 2025, she was a mentor in the DATAS residency for artists working across the subjects of new media and sovereignty in Central and Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus. In 2024, she was a mentor for designers and artists at the Synthetic Minds Lab at Medialab Matadero, and was an affiliate researcher at Antikythera, a think tank for speculative computation. Her work has been presented internationally at venues including the University of Cambridge, the Goethe Institute, e-flux, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She collaborates regularly with art institutions such as Ljubljana Biennale, Fundação de Serralves, Singapore Art Museum, and ZKM Center for Art and Media.