Aksioma at panke.gallery – launch of new publications & conversation with the authors; part of Vorspiel 2026
📍 panke.gallery, Thursday, 29 January 2026 at 7 PM (Gerichtstr. 23, Hof 5, 13347 Berlin)
https://panke.gallery/event/benze-de-ream-and-sophie-publig
Aksioma returns to the panke.gallery to launch its new multithread publishing line, promote the latest issue of the PostscriptUM series and celebrate the release of its latest book, Are You A Software Update?
https://aksioma.org/aksioma-at-panke
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Programme schedule (29 JAN 2026):
19:00
Introduction by Janez Fakin Janša
Presentation of the multithread editorial series
by Lea Sande and Ema Maznik Antić
19:10
Benze De Ream on multithread #1: The Blue Flower Syndrome
19:30
Mikkel Rørbo on multithread #2: Digital Occultism (preview)
19:40
Sophie Publig on PostScriptum #54: Swiping Right on God
20:00
Conversation with Sophie Publig and Benze De Ream
Moderated by Lea Sande and Ema Maznik Antić
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The multithread series
https://aksioma.org/publications/multithread
multithread is a new editorial series by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, edited by Lea Sande and Ema Maznik Antić, focusing primarily on artistic and creative interventions in the field of online and algorithmic landscapes. Rather than institutional forms and the voices of established theorists, multithread promotes the emerging perspectives of critical observers who address the topic of the contemporary socio-technological condition, moving beyond academic rigor as the dominant framework, while remaining in dialogue with leading-edge discourse.
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multithread #1
Benze De Ream
The Blue Flower Syndrome
Afterword by Metahaven
The Blue Flower Syndrome is a discussion on palatability, power and computation encoded in a single rushed train [of thought] // [commute] to an interview on a Dutch iris farm. Blending autofiction, media theory and myth, it traces the entanglements between public-facing interfaces, machinic mathematics and the data that fuels them. The work reveals how life as a product of purely probabilistic and statistical decisions expresses and roots itself through both our daily essentials, such as clothes and food, as well as historical practices and technologies that shaped them. In the afterword, Metahaven expands on the text by outlining influence design – a project in which computation operates as an ideological carrier – placing The Blue Flower Syndrome within a contemporary media landscape read through a historical-materialist lens.
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PostScriptUM #54
Sophie Publig
Swiping Right on God
https://aksioma.org/swiping-right-on-god
The 54th issue of PostScriptUM features Swiping Right on God, an essay by internet archaeologist and digital ecosystem explorer Sophie Publig investigating how spirituality mutates in the age of platform capitalism. Through media theory, meme analysis and posthuman philosophy, the author traces how angelcore aesthetics and digital mysticism reroute the internet as a sacred infrastructure, giving rise to Network Spirituality. Between post-irony and belief, kawaii semiotics disguise ideology in softness, forming an affective interface between ritualistic devotion and algorithmic governance.
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Nora O' Murchú, Janez Fakin Janša, eds.
Are You a Software Update?
https://aksioma.org/are-you-a-software-update
Not all forms of power announce themselves. Some move quietly, shaping how we feel, act and inhabit the world. Increasingly, the logic of software transforms the conditions of participation, embedding control into interfaces, automating governance through terms and conditions, and configuring compliance through algorithmic sorting, behavioural prediction and the continuous management of visibility. Are You a Software Update? brings together seven authors to examine the intensifying form of totalitarianism grounded in the quiet background logic of contemporary technology.
Alberto Toscano, Alex Quicho, Nora O’ Murchú, Noura Tafeche, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne and Wassim Z. Alsindi explore how infrastructures built for scale, extraction and control have come to embody this totalising logic. They show how platforms stabilise sentiment, how images perform order and how data becomes the medium through which consent is manufactured and dissent is neutralised. Their essays reveal a world governed by calibration – a fascist tendency expressed through the everyday management of attention, emotion and presence.
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multithread #2
Sophie Publig & Mikkel Rørbo
Digital Occultism
Release date: Spring 2026
The essay by researchers at the Weibel Institute, Sophie Publig and Mikkel Rørbo, will frame digital occultism as a method to analyze why digital cultures and techno-culture turned towards esoteric vocabularies and ever weirder political horizons.
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Participants:
Benze De Ream is an designer, artist, and researcher whose practice investigates the political and cognitive mechanics of algorithmic systems. He has been trained at the Geo-Design department, Design Academy Eindhoven, and is a recipient of the Gijs Bakker Award. His research unfolds through moving image, performance, writing, and experiential installation, probing how computation choreographs social and affective realities.
Sophie Publig is an internet archaeologist exploring digital ecosystems and their artefacts. Based at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, her research and teaching focus on the dynamics of digital cultures through critical post-humanism. She wrote her dissertation on the history of internet memes in 2023 and is currently examining the Girl Online, digital occultism and trajectories of schizoposting.
Lea Sande is a researcher, journalist and editor who produces a monthly programme called Povratne zanke (Feedback Loops) at Radio Študent, where she discusses internet theory, culture, and literature. She works in the field of the sociology of technology, focusing on the role of computation in contemporary capitalism, the development of artificial intelligence, and the cultural derivatives of emerging technologies.
Ema Maznik Antić is a visual artist working primarily with installation, sculpture, text, and voice, often through research-based and site-responsive processes situated in urban and post-industrial environments. She has been part of the Aksioma team since 2025.
Mikkel Rørbo is a producer of cultural detritus and interdisciplinary researcher on hyperstition, abductive inference, reality-production and desire.
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Production of the event: panke.gallery and Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2026
Financial support: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana