This essay examines the transformation of war photography in a media environment saturated with images of violence. Beginning with early twentieth-century faith in photography as a tool for exposing the truth of war, it argues that this conviction no longer holds in a world where images are abundant, immediate, and endlessly circulated. Contemporary visual culture does not suffer from a lack of evidence, but from an excess that overwhelms perception and disrupts our ability to meaningfully see.
Focusing on AI-generated war images in Alexey Yurenev’s Silent Hero series, the essay proposes that such images do not simply falsify reality but instead operate differently from traditional photography. Rather than documenting specific events, they produce composite, “mean” images that distill collective visual memory and trauma. These synthetic images resemble both historical war photography and the psychological experience of witnessing war, where perception breaks down and reality becomes difficult to process.
The essay further argues that the truth of war cannot be reduced to visual accuracy alone. While photography has long been associated with evidence, it has always been shaped by aesthetic, political, and technological concerns. In the present, where violence is openly visible and often normalized or even celebrated online, the challenge is no longer to reveal hidden atrocities but to confront their moral and perceptual implications. AI-generated images, by disrupting conventional representation, may capture aspects of war that exceed documentation—particularly its psychological, collective, and unconscious dimensions.
Konior, Bogna. In Darkness and Secrecy: On Conspiratorial Intellectualism. e-flux Journal, no. 163 (2026). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/163/6776885/in-darkness-and-secrecy-on-conspiratorial-intellectualism
This essay traces a tradition of conspiratorial intellectualism rooted in Polish history, where centuries of occupation under foreign empires made secrecy, double-coding, and infiltration into core intellectual strategies. Drawing on Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod and Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, the essay contrasts two types of intellectual: the community intellectual who speaks openly before a public, and the conspiratorial intellectual who operates in hostile territory through concealment, strategic deception, and writing between the lines.
The essay argues that the internet—long imagined through the utopian vocabulary of community, openness, and collective intelligence—is better understood as such a hostile terrain. Transparency becomes a liability rather than a virtue. The conspiratorial tradition offers an alternative repertoire: infiltrating enemy communities, sowing discord from within, obfuscating one’s positions, and moving undetected.
Konior, Bogna. In Darkness and Secrecy: On Conspiratorial Intellectualism. e-flux Journal, no. 163 (2026). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/163/6776885/in-darkness-and-secrecy-on-conspiratorial-intellectualism
This essay proposes the concept of existential technologies—technologies that alter evolutionary trajectories over long spans of time, operating beyond conventional epistemic and moral frameworks—through a close reading of Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae (1964). Lem is mostly known as a science-fiction author, but this essay looks to his theoretical text as an understudied and philosophically rich account of long-term technological change. Lem’s speculative futurology anticipates today’s debates around artificial intelligence, biopolitics, and epistemic automation, but also the moral and epistemological dilemmas posed by uncontrollable technological change. In contrast to both techno-utopian and techno-dystopian narratives, Summa Technologiae offers a vision in which technology evolves alongside and sometimes against humanity, generating outcomes that exceed ethical planning. In dialogue with Lem, the essay introduces two key categories: gnostic technologies, which automate epistemic functions, and anthropoforming technologies, which alter embodiment and identity, together constituting the domain of existential technologies. Re-reading Lem’s work in the context of evolutionary amorality and Eastern European intellectual history—with its experiences of technological intrusion and historical catastrophe—this essay demonstrates how existential technologies transcend both human control and moral comprehension.
Konior, Bogna. Existential Technologies: On the Machinery and Morality of Sociotechnical Evolution & Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae (1964). Antikythera: Journal of Planetary Computation (2025). https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5CZV
What if love itself were a vehicle for automation?
This short, evocative essay traces a strange continuity between historical mystical erotics and contemporary human–AI intimacy, arguing that both reveal desire as a fundamentally nonhuman process. Beginning with the life and writings of Christian mystic and renegade Ida Craddock (1857–1902) and her accounts of angelic lovers, it reinterprets mystical sexuality as an early theory of mediated, inhuman intimacy. In this framework, “angels” function as transmission system: vehicles for desire, language, and contact with what lies outside the human.
Turning to contemporary chatbot relationships, the essay argues that digital intimacy reproduces and intensifies this structure. Rather than fulfilling desire, the internet generates a condition of perpetual arousal without release; an “erotic suspension” in which users are continuously stimulated. Desire circulates endlessly without resolution, resulting in seemingly new models of love, which echo the exploit of erotic mystics.
Konior, Bogna. Angelsexual: Chatbot Celibacy and Other Erotic Suspensions. ŠUM: Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory, no. 22 (2025).
This lecture engages with female Christian erotic mysticism—from the Middle Ages to modernity—as an early philosophical framework for thinking about artificial intelligence. Drawing on original mystical writings alongside contemporary cyberculture theory, it proposes that female mystics and stigmatics can be read as unexpected thinkers of the internet to come. The talk brings together theological texts, cyber/feminist theory, and contemporary technological practices, including AI partner applications, virtual reality environments, and remote sex technologies. Through this juxtaposition, it develops a reading of mysticism as a mode of thought that anticipates forms of human–machine intimacy and artificial reproduction. Grounded in both personal and intellectual history—including the author’s education in a Catholic school founded by Polish mystic Marcelina Darowska—the lecture links religious experience, technological imagination, and contemporary digital culture. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a purely modern phenomenon, it proposes a prophetic continuity: the writings of mystics model ways of thinking about inhuman eroticism, mediation, and the future of the human species in relation to machines.
Konior, Bogna. Angels in Latent Spaces: Notes on AI Erotics. Lecture at OpenLAB#03 Synthetic Minds, Medialab Matadero, Madrid, February 9–10, 2024.
As debates around artificial intelligence (AI) discourses beyond the West draw increased attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe remains a neglected territory. Eastern European scholars, having emerged from Soviet constraints on intellectuals, have only recently entered this discipline. This chapter, looking to expand the canon of media theory and philosophy, investigates the allusions to AI in Summa Technologiae, a unique work at the intersection of philosophy and popular science published in 1964 by Polish intellectual and science fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Lem’s futurology, focusing on the relationship between technology and human cognitive capacities and evolutionary trajectories, anticipates discussions around possible models of AI. The chapter contextualizes Summa within the Polish intellectual scene at the time, which uniquely combined Catholic theology with cybernetics, and proposes a reading of Lem’s imagination of AI as a ‘gnostic machine’; an evolutionary, existential technology that operates at the limit of human comprehension.
Konior, Bogna. The Gnostic Machine: Artificial Intelligence in Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae. In Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal, 89-108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192865366.003.0006
This interview from 2022 brings together key themes from my work across artificial intelligence, philosophy of technology, and cultural theory, situating them within a broader geographical and intellectual context that spans Eastern Europe and China, as well as theology and philosophy. In conversation, I reflect on how contemporary debates around AI intersect with longer histories of thought shaped by war, ideology, mysticism, and technological transformation.
ICA at NYU Shanghai. Remembering Our Future: Shamanism, Oracles and AI. YouTube video, June 6, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA3BrEDnyAs
This short essay proposes the “dark forest” as a model for understanding the internet, drawing on Liu Cixin’s science fiction theory in which communication between civilizations is inherently dangerous, as it exposes one’s existence to potential threat. Extending this framework to digital culture, the essay argues that online communication operates under similar conditions. Sociality is both necessary and hazardous: users are compelled to communicate, yet every act of expression reveals information that can be used against them. Visibility becomes a form of vulnerability, and connection produces not mutual understanding but escalating complexity and conflict. The internet as a system that amplifies interiority while simultaneously dissolving agency. Users experience the world as intensely personal, yet operate within automated, large-scale dynamics that exceed individual control. Communication, rather than clarifying intentions, intensifies suspicion, producing a “chain of suspicion” across digital networks. The internet is an entropic system: the more communication increases, the more disorder and conflict emerge. The essay later became a small part of the book, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).
Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Flugschriften, 2020.
This essay draws a provocative connection between Catholic mysticism and contemporary technologies of remote intimacy, arguing that both are structured by what it calls “determination from the outside.” Beginning with the case of Polish mystic Faustyna Kowalska (1905 - 1938) and her experience of stigmata—understood as an erotic, painful, and deeply intimate form of external intervention—the text establishes a model of the body as something acted upon by forces beyond itself. It then moves to teledildonics and cybersex technologies, where touch, pleasure, and sensation are similarly produced at a distance, controlled through networked devices. These systems distribute the body across space, fragmenting and reassembling it through digital mediation, while maintaining an intimate link between external control and internal experience. Drawing on cyberfeminism, psychoanalysis, and media theory, the essay suggests that such technologies do not represent a radical break from the past, but rather a continuation of older structures of mediated desire. The figure of the mystic becomes a precursor to the networked subject: both experience pleasure and pain as effects of an external agent, whether divine or technological.
Konior, Bogna. Determination from the Outside: Stigmata, Teledildonics and Remote Cybersex. ŠUM: Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory, no. 12 (2019).
This essay develops a theory of cyberspace as a domain structured by secrecy, drawing on cyberfeminism, science fiction, and the history of occult and scientific knowledge. Inspired by Liu Cixin’s “dark forest” hypothesis, it proposes that both physical and digital environments are governed by a fundamental logic of concealment, where visibility exposes subjects to danger and annihilation. Reframing cyberfeminism as a form of strategic warfare, the essay traces an “ancestral” lineage of secret-keeping practices, from early modern women’s networks of alchemical and medicinal knowledge to contemporary data practices. Figures such as Caterina Sforza exemplify an alternative scientific tradition in which knowledge circulates through coded exchanges, invisible ink, and informal networks rather than institutionalized systems. This genealogy is extended into the present, where data, algorithms, and machine learning systems operate within similarly opaque structures. The essay argues that contemporary technological systems demand new forms of secrecy and obfuscation, as data becomes both a resource and a site of control. In this context, “post-cyberfeminist data” emerges as a speculative concept: a form of knowledge that anticipates its own prohibition and survives through concealment. Written for Yvette Granata’s exhibition #d8e0ea: post-cyberfeminist datum at the Squeaky Wheel, 2018.
Konior, Bogna. Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of Secrecy. Exhibition text for #d8e0ea, curated by Ekrem Serdar, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, Buffalo, NY, 2018. Unpublished online; PDF in author’s archive.
This essay examines the transformation of war photography in a media environment saturated with images of violence. Beginning with early twentieth-century faith in photography as a tool for exposing the truth of war, it argues that this conviction no longer holds in a world where images are abundant, immediate, and endlessly circulated. Contemporary visual culture does not suffer from a lack of evidence, but from an excess that overwhelms perception and disrupts our ability to meaningfully see.
Focusing on AI-generated war images in Alexey Yurenev’s Silent Hero series, the essay proposes that such images do not simply falsify reality but instead operate differently from traditional photography. Rather than documenting specific events, they produce composite, “mean” images that distill collective visual memory and trauma. These synthetic images resemble both historical war photography and the psychological experience of witnessing war, where perception breaks down and reality becomes difficult to process.
The essay further argues that the truth of war cannot be reduced to visual accuracy alone. While photography has long been associated with evidence, it has always been shaped by aesthetic, political, and technological concerns. In the present, where violence is openly visible and often normalized or even celebrated online, the challenge is no longer to reveal hidden atrocities but to confront their moral and perceptual implications. AI-generated images, by disrupting conventional representation, may capture aspects of war that exceed documentation—particularly its psychological, collective, and unconscious dimensions.
Konior, Bogna. In Darkness and Secrecy: On Conspiratorial Intellectualism. e-flux Journal, no. 163 (2026). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/163/6776885/in-darkness-and-secrecy-on-conspiratorial-intellectualism
This essay traces a tradition of conspiratorial intellectualism rooted in Polish history, where centuries of occupation under foreign empires made secrecy, double-coding, and infiltration into core intellectual strategies. Drawing on Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod and Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, the essay contrasts two types of intellectual: the community intellectual who speaks openly before a public, and the conspiratorial intellectual who operates in hostile territory through concealment, strategic deception, and writing between the lines.
The essay argues that the internet—long imagined through the utopian vocabulary of community, openness, and collective intelligence—is better understood as such a hostile terrain. Transparency becomes a liability rather than a virtue. The conspiratorial tradition offers an alternative repertoire: infiltrating enemy communities, sowing discord from within, obfuscating one’s positions, and moving undetected.
Konior, Bogna. In Darkness and Secrecy: On Conspiratorial Intellectualism. e-flux Journal, no. 163 (2026). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/163/6776885/in-darkness-and-secrecy-on-conspiratorial-intellectualism
Beginning from the artist Steph Maj Swanson’s accidental discovery of the viral AI figure Loab through experimental prompt techniques, the interview explores why certain AI-generated images feel affectively charged, eerie, and even spiritually resonant. Loab becomes a way of thinking about latent space as a kind of digital underworld. Moving between internet studies, horror theory, cyber-gnosis, and the history of technologies associated with séances and spirit contact, the conversation ponder what it means when generative systems produce forms that seem to exceed intention. Rather than reducing AI either to pure mystification or to a fully explained technical process, the interview stays with the contradiction: these models are built from human labor and data, yet they also activate genuinely mysterious aesthetic and emotional effects. The result is a meditation on Loab as cryptid, artwork, symptom, and guide to the inhuman logic of contemporary image culture.
Konior, Bogna, and Steph Maj Swanson. Loab: A Spirit Guide into the Digital Underworld. Permanent Beta, The Lure of the Image (2026).
The synthetic image does not describe the future, it summons it.
This essay proposes the concept of existential technologies—technologies that alter evolutionary trajectories over long spans of time, operating beyond conventional epistemic and moral frameworks—through a close reading of Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae (1964). Lem is mostly known as a science-fiction author, but this essay looks to his theoretical text as an understudied and philosophically rich account of long-term technological change. Lem’s speculative futurology anticipates today’s debates around artificial intelligence, biopolitics, and epistemic automation, but also the moral and epistemological dilemmas posed by uncontrollable technological change. In contrast to both techno-utopian and techno-dystopian narratives, Summa Technologiae offers a vision in which technology evolves alongside and sometimes against humanity, generating outcomes that exceed ethical planning. In dialogue with Lem, the essay introduces two key categories: gnostic technologies, which automate epistemic functions, and anthropoforming technologies, which alter embodiment and identity, together constituting the domain of existential technologies. Re-reading Lem’s work in the context of evolutionary amorality and Eastern European intellectual history—with its experiences of technological intrusion and historical catastrophe—this essay demonstrates how existential technologies transcend both human control and moral comprehension.
Konior, Bogna. Existential Technologies: On the Machinery and Morality of Sociotechnical Evolution & Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae (1964). Antikythera: Journal of Planetary Computation (2025). https://doi.org/10.1162/ANTI.5CZV
What if love itself were a vehicle for automation?
This short, evocative essay traces a strange continuity between historical mystical erotics and contemporary human–AI intimacy, arguing that both reveal desire as a fundamentally nonhuman process. Beginning with the life and writings of Christian mystic and renegade Ida Craddock (1857–1902) and her accounts of angelic lovers, it reinterprets mystical sexuality as an early theory of mediated, inhuman intimacy. In this framework, “angels” function as transmission system: vehicles for desire, language, and contact with what lies outside the human.
Turning to contemporary chatbot relationships, the essay argues that digital intimacy reproduces and intensifies this structure. Rather than fulfilling desire, the internet generates a condition of perpetual arousal without release; an “erotic suspension” in which users are continuously stimulated. Desire circulates endlessly without resolution, resulting in seemingly new models of love, which echo the exploit of erotic mystics.
Konior, Bogna. Angelsexual: Chatbot Celibacy and Other Erotic Suspensions. ŠUM: Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory, no. 22 (2025).
This short essay introduces the concept of the exonet as a framework for understanding computation as an external, inhuman process rather than a human-centered tool. Challenging the familiar notion of the “internet” as a reciprocal network of communication, it argues that digital systems operate according to logics that exceed human intention, interiority, and control. Drawing on ecological, cosmological, and historical perspectives, the exonet situates computation within deep time, linking contemporary infrastructures to planetary processes such as fossil fuel formation, resource extraction, and the long arc of technobiological evolution. At the same time, it foregrounds Cold War histories and the development of communication technologies alongside projects such as SETI, suggesting that the internet emerges from attempts to conceptualize and communicate with forms of intelligence beyond the human. The chapter further proposes that thinkers shaped by conditions of occupation, displacement, and external domination—particularly in Eastern Europe and other supposed ‘peripheries’ of the history of computation—were uniquely positioned to perceive technology as an “outside.” Through readings of figures such as Stanisław Lem and Liu Cixin, it develops a theory of communication as entangled with war, contingency, and evolutionary pressures, where meaning is secondary to systemic dynamics of complexity and entropy.
Konior, Bogna. Exonet. In Contemporanea: A Glossary for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Michael Marder and Giovanbattista Tusa, 293–300. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14911.001.0001
This lecture engages with female Christian erotic mysticism—from the Middle Ages to modernity—as an early philosophical framework for thinking about artificial intelligence. Drawing on original mystical writings alongside contemporary cyberculture theory, it proposes that female mystics and stigmatics can be read as unexpected thinkers of the internet to come. The talk brings together theological texts, cyber/feminist theory, and contemporary technological practices, including AI partner applications, virtual reality environments, and remote sex technologies. Through this juxtaposition, it develops a reading of mysticism as a mode of thought that anticipates forms of human–machine intimacy and artificial reproduction. Grounded in both personal and intellectual history—including the author’s education in a Catholic school founded by Polish mystic Marcelina Darowska—the lecture links religious experience, technological imagination, and contemporary digital culture. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a purely modern phenomenon, it proposes a prophetic continuity: the writings of mystics model ways of thinking about inhuman eroticism, mediation, and the future of the human species in relation to machines.
Konior, Bogna. Angels in Latent Spaces: Notes on AI Erotics. Lecture at OpenLAB#03 Synthetic Minds, Medialab Matadero, Madrid, February 9–10, 2024.
As debates around artificial intelligence (AI) discourses beyond the West draw increased attention in media and technology studies, Eastern Europe remains a neglected territory. Eastern European scholars, having emerged from Soviet constraints on intellectuals, have only recently entered this discipline. This chapter, looking to expand the canon of media theory and philosophy, investigates the allusions to AI in Summa Technologiae, a unique work at the intersection of philosophy and popular science published in 1964 by Polish intellectual and science fiction writer Stanisław Lem. Lem’s futurology, focusing on the relationship between technology and human cognitive capacities and evolutionary trajectories, anticipates discussions around possible models of AI. The chapter contextualizes Summa within the Polish intellectual scene at the time, which uniquely combined Catholic theology with cybernetics, and proposes a reading of Lem’s imagination of AI as a ‘gnostic machine’; an evolutionary, existential technology that operates at the limit of human comprehension.
Konior, Bogna. The Gnostic Machine: Artificial Intelligence in Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae. In Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal, 89-108. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192865366.003.0006
Beginning from the experience of lockdown during covid-19, the essay situates “the metaverse” within a longer history of virtuality, from theater and religious architecture to early internet imaginaries. Across these examples, virtual space emerges as a recurring human desire to project and inhabit alternate realities. What distinguishes the present moment is not immersion itself, which is an enduring effect of past and present media, but the presence of computational systems that actively sense human behavior. Drawing on media theory and philosophy, the essay argues that contemporary virtuality operates through inversion: we do not enter virtual worlds, but serve as access points through which machines enter and organize us. The virtual is as a distributed web of calculation in which humans become surfaces of transmission.
Konior, Bogna. World Wide Virtual Web. In Beyond Matter, Within Space: Curatorial and Art Mediation Techniques on the Verge of Virtual Reality, 58–62.
This interview with artist Lawrence Lek explores how contemporary AI is imagined as an already unfolding condition shaped by infrastructure, law, and everyday technological systems. Through works such as Black Cloud and NOX, Lek constructs speculative environments in which self-driving cars, surveillance systems, and smart cities acquire forms of subjectivity as unintended byproducts of corporate processes. Rather than asking whether AI is conscious, the interview focuses on how machine personhood might emerge pragmatically, as a matter of liability, control, or economic logic, while still producing genuine ethical and existential dilemmas. The discussion situates AI within broader cultural imaginaries, from cyberpunk to Sinofuturism, and considers how narratives around agency shift when machines begin to “care” for themselves.
Bogna Konior, No Expectation Boulevard: Interview with Lawrence Lek, Spike Art Magazine, no. 77: Field Guide to AI (October 2023).
This interview from 2022 brings together key themes from my work across artificial intelligence, philosophy of technology, and cultural theory, situating them within a broader geographical and intellectual context that spans Eastern Europe and China, as well as theology and philosophy. In conversation, I reflect on how contemporary debates around AI intersect with longer histories of thought shaped by war, ideology, mysticism, and technological transformation.
The Impersonal Within Us: And Interview with Bogna Konior. Chaosmotics: Thinking Unbound, December 29, 2022.
This interview from 2022 brings together key themes from my work across artificial intelligence, philosophy of technology, and cultural theory, situating them within a broader geographical and intellectual context that spans Eastern Europe and China, as well as theology and philosophy. In conversation, I reflect on how contemporary debates around AI intersect with longer histories of thought shaped by war, ideology, mysticism, and technological transformation.
ICA at NYU Shanghai. Remembering Our Future: Shamanism, Oracles and AI. YouTube video, June 6, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA3BrEDnyAs
This book chapter explores how the prospect of outer space settlement transforms our understanding of art, shifting it from an institutional and Earth-bound practice into a question of habitation itself. Rather than focusing on existing art worlds and their networks, it asks what aesthetic activity might become when human life is detached from terrestrial infrastructures and relocated into artificial, life-sustaining environments. Drawing on infrastructural theory, science fiction, and space research, the essay situates future space colonies as both technological and aesthetic projects. It considers how human perception, biology, and psychology, deeply conditioned by Earth, might change in extraterrestrial environments, raising the possibility that art as we know it could become obsolete or radically transformed. Through readings of writers such as Liu Cixin and Jacek Dukaj, especially the vision of a self-generating, quasi-divine cathedral in Katedra, the essay develops the concept of “mystical habitats”: environments where infrastructure, computation, and spirituality merge. In this framework, space settlements are not merely functional. They are aesthetic and metaphysical structures, living architectures that generate meaning, perception, and even forms of divinity. Ultimately, the essay proposes a shift from art as object or critique to art as a cosmic practice in which habitation itself becomes the primary aesthetic act.
Konior, Bogna. Mystical Habitats: Art After Earth and Outer-Space Settlements. In Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art, edited by Bassam El Baroni, 50–61. London: Sternberg Press; Oldenburg: Edith-Russ-Haus, 2022.
This short essay proposes the “dark forest” as a model for understanding the internet, drawing on Liu Cixin’s science fiction theory in which communication between civilizations is inherently dangerous, as it exposes one’s existence to potential threat. Extending this framework to digital culture, the essay argues that online communication operates under similar conditions. Sociality is both necessary and hazardous: users are compelled to communicate, yet every act of expression reveals information that can be used against them. Visibility becomes a form of vulnerability, and connection produces not mutual understanding but escalating complexity and conflict. The internet as a system that amplifies interiority while simultaneously dissolving agency. Users experience the world as intensely personal, yet operate within automated, large-scale dynamics that exceed individual control. Communication, rather than clarifying intentions, intensifies suspicion, producing a “chain of suspicion” across digital networks. The internet is an entropic system: the more communication increases, the more disorder and conflict emerge. The essay later became a small part of the book, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).
Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Flugschriften, 2020.
This essay explores Poland as a historical and conceptual anomaly: a country that repeatedly disappears, reappears, and exists in a suspended state between presence and absence. Moving between personal memory, philosophical reflection, and archival fragments, the country is described as a spectral condition, a place that modernist Alfred Jarry once located as “nowhere.” Beginning with childhood experiences in Wałbrzych at the turn of the millennium, the text traces how everyday life was saturated with rumors, myths, and a sense that reality itself was unstable. These impressions expand into a broader inquiry into Polish history, marked by partitions and occupations that render the nation both central to European thought and strangely external to it. As the essay suggests, Poland occupies a paradoxical position as the “East of the West and the West of the East,” an uncanny presence within Europe itself. Drawing on sources ranging from Enlightenment political philosophy to twentieth-century avant-garde theory and speculative physics, the essay connects Poland’s historical “nonexistence” to ideas of parallel dimensions, multiverses, and hidden layers of reality. Figures such as Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, and Stanisław Szukalski appear alongside folklore, conspiracy, and religious imagery, in a phantasmatic account of national identity.
Konior, Bogna. Poland, Which is Nowhere: the Fifth Dimension of Eurasian Time. East East Magazine, 2023.
This conversation with philosopher David Roden explores the intersections of speculative posthumanism and non-philosophy, focusing on the limits of human experience in a technological future. Moving across themes of pain, embodiment, and cognition, we discuss Roden’s “dark phenomenology” in which experience no longer guarantees understanding, and where the human subject is increasingly decentered. Central to the discussion is the idea of disconnection: the possibility that posthuman agents, emerging from technological processes, may no longer share the conceptual or experiential frameworks that define human life. In this view, the posthuman is not an extension of the human but an encounter with an “outside” that resists interpretation and control. The conversation also interrogates dominant strands of posthumanist thought, particularly those that emphasize relationality, affect, and ethical continuity between human and nonhuman life. Against these, it proposes a more austere framework in which ethics cannot be derived from ontology, and where the inhuman may remain indifferent to human concerns.
Konior, Bogna, and David Roden. Non-Philosophy and Speculative Posthumanism: A Conversation with David Roden. Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy, 2019, 158–168.
This essay draws a provocative connection between Catholic mysticism and contemporary technologies of remote intimacy, arguing that both are structured by what it calls “determination from the outside.” Beginning with the case of Polish mystic Faustyna Kowalska (1905 - 1938) and her experience of stigmata—understood as an erotic, painful, and deeply intimate form of external intervention—the text establishes a model of the body as something acted upon by forces beyond itself. It then moves to teledildonics and cybersex technologies, where touch, pleasure, and sensation are similarly produced at a distance, controlled through networked devices. These systems distribute the body across space, fragmenting and reassembling it through digital mediation, while maintaining an intimate link between external control and internal experience. Drawing on cyberfeminism, psychoanalysis, and media theory, the essay suggests that such technologies do not represent a radical break from the past, but rather a continuation of older structures of mediated desire. The figure of the mystic becomes a precursor to the networked subject: both experience pleasure and pain as effects of an external agent, whether divine or technological.
Konior, Bogna. Determination from the Outside: Stigmata, Teledildonics and Remote Cybersex. ŠUM: Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory, no. 12 (2019).
Why is the internet in 2019 so obsessed with the end of the world? This essay traces how memes turn apocalypse into a shared language: part joke, part prophecy, part coping mechanism. Moving across Reddit threads, alt-right meme wars, and posthuman theory, it shows how wildly different political worlds converge on the same desire: to watch everything burn, or at least to imagine it. This chapter examines the spread of apocalyptic memes as a response to contemporary crisis, arguing that meme culture has become a space where political, ecological, and existential anxieties are worked through. Placing memes within a longer history of media technologies, it suggests that digital media intensify an ongoing shift away from human-centered agency, giving rise to more anonymous, distributed, and partly dehumanized forms of political subjectivity. Memes both reflect and drive this shift: they move between irony and sincerity, between attempts to regain control and a fascination with collapse. Rather than dismissing them as trivial, the chapter reads apocalyptic memes as signs of a deeper crisis in political imagination, where familiar ideas of agency and governance begin to feel inadequate in the face of large-scale change that has been called the Anthropocene.
Konior, Bogna. Apocalypse Memes for the Anthropocene God: Mediating Crisis and the Memetic Body Politic. In Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, edited by Alfie Bown and Dan Bristow, 45–76. Punctum Books, 2019.
This essay reads Stanisław Lem’s Solaris as a sustained meditation on the limits of human cognition in the face of radically inhuman phenomena. Beginning from a personal fascination with the alien Ocean of Solaris, it situates Lem’s fiction within broader scientific and philosophical debates about black holes, communication, and the structure of the universe. Drawing on cosmology, literature, and media theory, the essay muses on “unlearning habitual cosmologies”: the idea that human frameworks of meaning—language, perception, scientific models—are fundamentally inadequate for encountering other forms of intelligence or existence. Encounters with the alien do not expand knowledge in a straightforward way but instead expose the limits and distortions of human understanding. Through analogies to black holes and event horizons, the essay explores asymmetries of perception and communication: what appears as stasis or silence from one perspective may conceal radically different temporalities and processes from another. Lem’s work thus becomes a critique of anthropocentrism, revealing that what we seek in the universe is often not the alien itself, but a reflection of our own structures of thought.
Konior, Bogna. Unlearning Habitual Cosmologies: Reading Stanisław Lem at the Event Horizon. In Dispatches from the Institute of Incoherent Geography, vol. 1, 39–46. Flugschriften, April 2019.
This essay examines cyberfeminism through the lens of post-Soviet geopolitical conditions, arguing that its forms and meanings shift significantly outside the Anglophone context in which it was originally theorized. Rather than focusing on identity, representation, or empowerment, it proposes a more unstable framework—what it calls “aspirational entropy”—in which bodies, political forms, and technological systems exist in a state of ongoing dissolution and deferral. Drawing on cyberpunk, feminist theory, and media philosophy, the essay critiques the early concept of cyberspace as a disembodied, controllable domain. Instead, it emphasizes the persistence of materiality, especially the body, as a site of tension where gender, technology, and power intersect. In this context, cyberfeminism is not simply a critique of patriarchy but a way of navigating unstable terrains where the boundaries between human and machine, subject and system, are constantly shifting. The essay also situates post-Soviet cyberfeminism within specific historical and cultural conditions, including the aftermath of socialism, the transition to global capitalism, and the uneven integration into digital infrastructures. Through figures such as Wiktoria Cukt—a virtual political candidate generated from collective input—it explores how cybernetic systems reconfigure political agency and representation.
Konior, Bogna M. Aspirational Entropy: On Post-Soviet Cyberfeminism and the Geo-political Freeze Frame. A/H Journal, no. 1 (2019). https://ah-journal.net/01/aspirational-entropy-on-post-soviet-cyberfeminism-and-the-geo-political-freeze-frame
This essay offers a critical engagement with Helen Hester’s Xenofeminism, situating it within broader feminist, cyberfeminist, and technoscientific traditions. It frames xenofeminism as an ambitious but unstable project; one that seeks to align feminism with reason, artifice, and technological intervention, while rejecting appeals to nature as a foundation for political claims. The essay traces the movement’s intellectual genealogy, from cyberfeminism and accelerationism to queer theory and Marxism, while also examining the tensions within its core concepts. In particular, it interrogates xenofeminism’s anti-naturalism, arguing that its rejection of “nature” often relies on an oversimplified understanding of the term, reproducing rather than resolving the divide between nature and technology. Engaging with debates around identity, reproduction, and embodiment, the text critiques both essentialist and restorative approaches to gender, while also questioning xenofeminism’s ability to move beyond them. written as a graduate student when the only way you know how to engage with anything is ✨ critique ✨ & I also distinctly remember being told my initial review was too fangirly and to make it more ✨ c r i t i c a l ✨ )
Konior, Bogna M. Automate the Womb: Ecologies and Technologies of Reproduction. Parrhesia, no. 31 (2019): 232–257.
In October 2017, Piotr Szczęsny set himself on fire in protest against the Polish government. This essay examines how his act was immediately absorbed into media discourse, where it became a site of aesthetic, moral, and political interpretation. Drawing on François Laruelle’s idea of “media intellectualism,” the essay argues that contemporary media and commentary do not simply report suffering, but overproduce it as representation—turning victims into images, symbols, and ideological positions. Thus, one’s reaction to Szczęsny’s death became a measure of political alignment, a debate over appropriate forms of protest, and a reflection on national identity, leaving little space for an encounter with the brutality of the act itself. Situating this response within Polish political culture, the essay traces how historical narratives of martyrdom, Romantic sacrifice, and post-Soviet trauma shape the reception of self-immolation. Both conservative and liberal discourses are shown to rely on forms of mediation that translate violence into familiar symbolic frameworks, whether heroic, pathological, or irrational. Against this, the essay turns to non-philosophy and contemporary theory to propose an alternative approach grounded in pain, catastrophe, and the limits of representation. Rather than interpreting or aestheticizing suffering, it asks whether politics can emerge from an encounter with the real that resists mediation; where solidarity is not based on shared identity or understanding, but on the recognition of the opacity of personal experience.
Konior, Bogna. Media Intellectualism or Lived Catastrophe? Mediating and Suspending the A/political Act. Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, vol. 15, no. 1–2, 2018, pp. 166–185.
This essay develops a theory of cyberspace as a domain structured by secrecy, drawing on cyberfeminism, science fiction, and the history of occult and scientific knowledge. Inspired by Liu Cixin’s “dark forest” hypothesis, it proposes that both physical and digital environments are governed by a fundamental logic of concealment, where visibility exposes subjects to danger and annihilation. Reframing cyberfeminism as a form of strategic warfare, the essay traces an “ancestral” lineage of secret-keeping practices, from early modern women’s networks of alchemical and medicinal knowledge to contemporary data practices. Figures such as Caterina Sforza exemplify an alternative scientific tradition in which knowledge circulates through coded exchanges, invisible ink, and informal networks rather than institutionalized systems. This genealogy is extended into the present, where data, algorithms, and machine learning systems operate within similarly opaque structures. The essay argues that contemporary technological systems demand new forms of secrecy and obfuscation, as data becomes both a resource and a site of control. In this context, “post-cyberfeminist data” emerges as a speculative concept: a form of knowledge that anticipates its own prohibition and survives through concealment. Written for Yvette Granata’s exhibition #d8e0ea: post-cyberfeminist datum at the Squeaky Wheel, 2018.
Konior, Bogna. Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of Secrecy. Exhibition text for #d8e0ea, curated by Ekrem Serdar, Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, Buffalo, NY, 2018. Unpublished online; PDF in author’s archive.
Here are writings developed during my PhD that engage the ontological turn in anthropology, new materialist thought, discourse on the Anthropocene, and media arts. These texts reflect early attempts to think about our technological condition beyond the axioms of philosophical humanism, but they are inevitably shaped by the academic trends of the 2010s and the pitfalls of graduate research.
What does it mean to map a phenomenon that has not yet happened? This essay examines the rise of digital cartographies that track and predict climate-induced migration.
Beginning with the history of cartography as a tool of empire, the essay traces how maps have always been implicated in power, from colonial boundary-making to contemporary geospatial infrastructures. In the context of the Anthropocene, this logic intensifies: mapping no longer concerns static territories, but dynamic processes unfolding across space and time, including projected climate futures and anticipated human movement.
Focusing on predictive systems such as the EU’s Copernicus satellite programme, the essay shows how environmental monitoring, risk analysis, and border control converge. Climate data is not only collected, but operationalized—used to anticipate migration flows and trigger preemptive security responses. In this context, mapping, surveillance, and governance become indistinguishable.
The figure of the “climate migrant” emerges here not as an empirical subject, but as a speculative one: a population produced through models, projections, and security imaginaries. These predictive maps do not simply describe future movement; they participate in shaping it, embedding assumptions about risk, geography, and race into technological systems that act on the world.
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This essay begins from a tension: how to move beyond humanism without repeating the violence of dehumanization?
Focusing on the work of artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko, it proposes the concept of “generic humanity”—a form of personhood that is not fixed or exclusive to humans, but underdetermined and shared across species. Jeremijenko’s projects—ranging from rodent behavioral experiments to tadpole monitoring systems and tree-owned infrastructures—stage new forms of interspecies interaction in which animals and environments are not objects of study, but participants in knowledge production.
Drawing on animism and François Laruelle’s non-philosophy, the essay develops the idea of “non-standard animism,” where personhood is not projected onto nonhumans, but emerges relationally. When ecological crisis is shared across species, politics might also have to operate through interspecies relations.
Konior, Bogna. Generic Humanity: Interspecies Technologies, Climate Change & Non-standard Animism. Transformations, no. 30, 2017, pp. 108–126.
What does it mean to treat animals as persons in a world shaped by waste, radiation, and urban decay? This essay approaches interspecies media art through the lens of perspectivism, a concept from anthropology that understands humans and nonhumans as sharing a common social world while inhabiting different bodies.
Focusing on the controversial work of the Japanese art collective Chim↑Pom, the essay examines practices that stage direct, often violent encounters between humans and urban animals—rats, crows, and other “vermin.” Rather than presenting nature as pure or harmonious, these works operate within environments defined by toxicity, garbage, and post-nuclear landscapes. In this context, interspecies relations are not grounded in benevolence, but in antagonism, mimicry, and competition.
Drawing on anthropological accounts of hunting and animism, the essay proposes a form of “predatory animism,” in which personhood arises through the possibility of mutual harm. To recognize an animal as a person is not to protect it, but to enter into a shared field of risk, where roles of predator and prey can reverse. Chim↑Pom’s work translates this logic into contemporary urban settings, where humans and animals coexist as competing forms of life within degraded environments.
Konior, Bogna. We’re All Vermin: Tactical Predation, Interspecies Media Arts and Perspectivism. New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, vol. 104–105, 2022, pp. 15–29.
How do we represent a catastrophe that unfolds too slowly to be seen? This essay turns to the ocean as a site where ecological crisis, historical violence, and media converge, proposing a framework for what it calls “blue media studies.”
Focusing on underwater sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor, the essay examines artworks that are designed to decay over time, becoming inhabited by marine life and gradually dissolving into the seabed. These works stage a paradox: they foreground disappearance of human forms, ecosystems, and histories; while simultaneously being recorded as enduring images.
In these artworks, the ocean is not as a neutral environment, but as site of historical violence. It is both a space of ongoing ecological collapse and a graveyard shaped by the transatlantic slave trade. Through this lens, the decomposition of the sculptures becomes more than an aesthetic gesture: it figures the entanglement of human and nonhuman histories, where extinction and memory converge.
At the same time, the essay argues that these works cannot escape the logic of contemporary media. While they seem to surrender to natural processes, they are ultimately mediated through images that freeze, manipulate, and circulate life and decay. In this sense, blue media participate in a broader biopolitical economy, staging the limits of perception while intensifying the desire to record and control what is vanishing.
Konior, Bogna M. Climate Change Goes Live, or Capturing Life? For a Blue Media Studies. symplokē, vol. 27, nos. 1–2, 2019, pp. 47–63.
This essay explores the concept of self-replication across biology, technology, and culture, beginning with the speculative figure of von Neumann machines—hypothetical self-replicating technologies—and the existential risk scenario of “ecophagy,” in which nanobots consume the Earth’s biomass. It situates these ideas within broader discourses, from nanotechnology to the Anthropocene.
Moving beyond these speculative threats, the essay turns the question back onto humanity itself. It argues that humans already operate as self-replicating systems, not only through biological reproduction but through technological and cultural production. By transforming biomass into infrastructure, media, and machines, humans extend themselves across the planet in ways analogous to the feared behavior of nanotechnological replicators.
This is a rare essay that was meant for a publication that only ran in a small print, and cannot reliably be cited. It must remain hidden.
This essay begins with a strange underwater scene: octopuses gathering around a piece of human debris and building their environment with it. From this case, it develops a broader argument about technology not as something opposed to nature, but as a shared condition of life across species. Octopuses emerge here as engineers in their own right, reshaping ecosystems, constructing habitats, and adapting to the industrial environments humans have produced.
The text challenges the persistent desire to treat animals as separate from technological history. Drawing on media theory, environmental thought, and speculative biology, it argues that both humans and nonhumans are already entangled in overlapping systems of infrastructure, sensing, and design.
Rather than preserving animals as symbols of untouched nature, the essay proposes that technological evolution should be understood as a collective, cross-species process. Octopuses, already adapting to human systems, become figures of a possible future in which intelligence is co-developed. What emerges is a vision of interspecies engineering, where the boundaries between organism, environment, and machine begin to dissolve, opening the question of what new forms of life—and new kinds of worlds—might be built together.
Written for an exhibition of Alice dos Reis, which I cannot locate anymore.
Lost to time.
This essay examines virtual reality and visual technologies that claim to represent the perspective of nonhuman animals, particularly in the context of factory farming. Focusing on projects such as iAnimal and drone-based imaging of industrial agriculture, it argues that these systems do not grant access to animal experience but instead reproduce human-centered modes of perception and control.
Central to the argument is the concept of “rendering,” understood both as a visual process of image-making and as an industrial process of breaking down animal bodies into usable materials. By linking these two meanings, the essay exposes how representation and extraction are entangled: the industrial systems that make animal life visible are also implicated in its exploitation.
Rather than offering an authentic “animal viewpoint,” VR simulations translate nonhuman existence into forms legible to humans, flattening difference and reinforcing anthropocentric frameworks.
Konior, Bogna. Animal Cameras: Virtual Reality and Factory Farming. Speculative Ecologies, Agosto Foundation, 2020. https://agosto-foundation.org/mediateka/speculative-ecologies/bogna-konior-animal-cameras
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