Seventeen years ago, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger made an argument about deleting as indissolubly linked to our capacity to survive and move forward (Schönberger 2009). At the time, this claim pointed to a paradox: while digital technologies offered unprecedented possibilities for erasure, the critical and sometimes subversive function of deletion as a form of negation was already beginning to erode. With the rapid expansion of storage capacities and tracking mechanisms, deletion has since become increasingly reduced, contested, or even impossible. How has the status of deleting changed from then to the present, when the daily rise of AI slop and the turbulence of world politics render this gesture seemingly futile?
Back in the late 2000s, we could argue that deleting still carried some weight. We regularly got rid of films, songs, games, or apps to free up space on hard drives. We erased blog posts or discussion forum conversations to avoid future embarrassment. At the same time, glitchy or pixelated images and sounds were still considered worth preserving and sharing. Fast forward to 2026, and we hardly even care enough to delete something. We can access all the entertainment we “need” through subscription platforms like Netflix, Spotify, or Steam, and the files we keep are often dispersed across multiple drives and clouds. Our social media interactions and exchanges with AI models like ChatGPT are effectively permanent, marked in digital ink and accessible for extraction by others. We are surrounded by lossless, high-resolution images and sounds, and even systemic failures have turned into mere pauses between updates (Alexander and Appadurai 2019). At the same time, many claim that the very logic of disruption has become fully co-opted by Big Tech, and therefore has little value for cultural production and its persistence (Owens 2024).
With all these problems in mind, our conference proposes to revisit current strategies of deletion both in the service of power (however we may define it) and for the purpose of resistance, refusal, or, more radically, as forms of negation of existing power structures. There are efforts across disciplines to showcase both how the current online regime deletes certain memories, histories, subjectivities, and forms of labour (Lingel 2021, Thylstrup 2025) and how creative strategies may rupture or perforate the relentless deluge of images, sounds, and texts (Dekeyser and Culp 2023, Klik 2026).
The conference aims to bring together media scholars, artists, archivists, and activists to examine how these opposing dynamics might be understood and mobilised. Instead of treating deletion as a lost or purely technical operation, we ask how it might regain critical relevance. Our aim is to collectively reflect on, and experiment with, infrastructures, methodologies, and epistemologies in which deleting can once again operate as a meaningful cultural and political act.
Hundreds of millions of fleeting digital moments are documented in screenshots taken readily on all kinds of devices - at will by people, but also routinely by software. Research on the history and present dynamic of digital media has come to rely heavily on screenshots, without reflecting systematically on the technical and epistemological status of these files and acts. Screenshots offer ways of capturing and sorting, remembering and sharing observations of our often quite ephemeral interactions with digital interfaces. While ostensibly aligned with storage against erasure and oblivion, screenshots are not easily reduced to a tool of memory, as they are often politicized, faked, contested, and circumvented. Moreover, once screenshot automation was harnessed by artificial intelligence, e.g. in the Microsoft Windows operating system, that generated discussions around controversial features that save screens for random-access purposes. Workarounds are not easy once the devices are taking screenshots in the background, raising questions about privacy and storage capacity, shaming and consent, posthumous access and deletion. In the critical zone between documenting and creating, copying and faking digital images, the culture of screenshots opens a vertiginous gap between the materiality of digital images and the wide array of meanings they can produce
Peter Krapp is Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with research and teaching interests in cultural memory and media history, cybernetics and cryptologic history, and the history of computing and of simulations. His publications include Medium Cool (2002), Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (2004), Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011), the Handbook Language-Culture-Communication (2013), and Computing Legacies: Digital Cultures of Simulation (2024). The latest is a forthcoming book on Museums of Computing: Stewardship of Digital Heritage (London: Palgrave, 2026).
This paper examines the historiographic significance of forgotten architectural software through a focused analysis of ModelShop (Paracomp in 1988), an early Macintosh based modelling program whose brief lifespan and limited adoption have rendered it largely invisible within dominant narratives of digital architecture. Despite its marginal status, ModelShop briefly enabled unusually rapid and affordable “true 3D” modelling at a moment of limited digital capability. Reconstructing its constrained environment, including its interface logics and seventeen modelling operations, demonstrates how obsolete software leaves operational residues that materially shaped architectural form and representation.
ModelShop operated within a narrow technological ecology: it ran on machines with as little as 1 MB of RAM, accepted only .PICT imports, and depended on .SIT compression archives for long term survival. Its sparse documentation and limited adoption render its operational logic recoverable only through fragmentary traces: two surviving videos, a few screenshots, and the geometric artefacts embedded within early digital models. ModelShop’s distinctive modelling behaviours left subtle yet consequential imprints on spatial articulation, curvature, and representational cadence in the early projects of Zaha Hadid Architects, shaping both design processes and their archival afterlives. Although born digital files serve as primary sites of authorship, their longevity is fragile. Without a stable ‘’camera’’ function, views in ModelShop were irreproducible, rendering printed outputs de facto originals and complicating later archival and historiographic reconstruction.
More broadly, the paper situates ModelShop within the precarious ontology of born digital architectural files, whose survival is threatened by format decay, failed compression archives, and partial emulation. This instability compels architectural history to confront the epistemic losses produced by unreadable interfaces. When operations, tool behaviours, and modelling assumptions disappear, so too do the conceptual lineages they once enabled. The forgotten interface therefore functions as a provocation: obsolete software must be understood not as peripheral technical debris but as constitutive agents in architectural thought.
Laura Nica is an architect and lecturer at the University of Westminster, currently undertaking AHRC-funded doctoral research in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation. Her work investigates the reconceptualization of digital archives within architectural practice, focusing on the extraction and interpretation of digital artefacts to formulate hypotheses, cultivate archival imagination, and develop speculative design methodologies.
In 2026, a positive notion of deletion might not ring as an entirely obvious provocation. The foreclosure of more caring and egalitarian alternatives to organizing societies can feel relentless. Authors Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian have pointed out how Elon Musk’s favorite word is “delete”: a management approach practice adapted from the financial method of zero-based budgeting. The idea is to remove, or delete a system’s elements one-by-one until “zero base,” and only what’s essential remains, thus achieving maximum efficiency, no matter the collateral damage. This was on full display throughout Musk’s savage DODGE endeavour. In this sense, deletion is a violent form of domination performed under the auspices of analysis and efficiency. Relatedly, deletion dovetails with the zealous devotion in Silicon Valley management culture to so-called creative destruction. To delete, therefore, suggests a foreclosing of possible worlds, and yet, through a particular dialectic, it also implies the building of new worlds. The question, as always: who gets to build and for whom is it built?
From this standpoint, deletion simultaneously asks what to build and what not to build. As a filmmaker and moving image artist, my practice is often consumed by the question of what goes into the edit and what’s left out. Deleting a timeline can be clarifying and also devastating. A cornerstone of this presentation will be a recent short video work in which I attempted to explore many of these questions through the history of photography and the image’s unstable relation to digital information, media, and preservation vis-à-vis the object of the semiconductor microchip.
Ryan S. Jeffery is a filmmaker and moving image artist working at the intersection between documentary, art, and media studies. Grounded in an analysis of aesthetics and politics, his work focuses on how certain narratives get translated into specific technologies and practices that shape culture as they are recursively absorbed back into it. He has taught critical studies and digital arts at the California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, and Syracuse University. My work has screened at FIDMarseille, Transmediale Berlin, La Gaîté lyrique, the European Media Arts Festival, the UNCCC Conference for Climate and Journalism, The New York Times, Do Not Research, and elsewhere.
This talk looks at the ‘strategies of refusal’ developed by 1980s West-German video collectives. In times of digital online collections and their metadata enrichment by allegedly ‘free’ offers from tech companies (in return for usage rights for AI training), groups like the Medienpädagogikzentrum (MPZ, est. 1973) and bildwechsel (est. 1979) resist oversharing. Guided by the ethos that ‘non-sharing is caring’, these collectives re-enact their original 1980s radical politics within the modern online sphere. Historically, these groups navigated the public sphere inspired by Kluge/Negt’s notion of the counter-public sphere, drawing on Habermas, and emancipatory media theories inspired by Tretyakov, Brecht, and Enzensberger. During the 1980s they established independent distribution networks and acquired their own means of production. Also, they refused collaborations with hegemonic media. This presentation explores how that original political stance informs their current politics of online visibility. Through an analysis of these two long-standing Hamburg-based collectives, I argue that their contemporary practice of refusal, far from being a failure of digital transition, has enabled their institutional sustainability. By controlling the terms of their own ‘publicness’, they preserve the radical autonomy of their audiovisual heritage against the threat of its commodification.
Dagmar Brunow is professor of film studies at Linnaeus University and the leader of the NECS-workgroup Media and Cultural Memory. Her research centres on archives, memory, film historiography, experimental filmmaking and independent video culture, feminist and queer cinema. She is the author of Remediating Transcultural Memory: Documentary Filmmaking as Archival Intervention (de Gruyter, 2015) and co-editor of the Frauen und Film special issue “Archive” (with Katharina Müller, 2024). Her research projects “The Lost Heritage: Improving Collaborations between Digital Film Archives” (2021–2024) and “The Cultural Heritage of Moving Images” (2016–2018) have been funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Many recent critical debates in media studies have been organized around questions of negation, often treating the negative (the “in” or “un”) as a placeholder for what falls beyond representation and perception. But what if there is another relation besides a strict binary of inside-outside to consider?
The talk, based on insights from my recent book Negative Media: Erasure and the Limits of Erasure, will advance the claim that our prevailing theoretical legacies do not yet provide an adequate language for understanding negativity as immanent to productive mediation. In the philosophical legacies of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Derrida, to name only a few, negation is most often cast as an outside peeking in, in the form of traces, residues, sedimentations, and layered remains. Nothing can truly vanish, just as the “nothing” can never be experienced as such. By topologically locating negativity outside the realm of the sensible, as an epistemic, political, or phenomenological limit, what ultimately remains under-theorized is the extent to which negative processes such as contraction, compression, and annihilation are actively enacted from within systems to make them functional and operable. As a result, we rarely confront the radical possibility that arises from the technical sphere: that the removal of data is necessary for our finite tools to work.
More concretely, I use the emerging NewSpace Industry and interstellar communication as a case in point (see Mueller & Taber 1959; Cert 2007). With the help of Jonathan Sterne, Sybille Krämer, and others, the talk will consider the significance of signal compression and minimization of storage to thinking production. At the cosmic scale and at such extremes, negative mediation becomes a practice of endurance, and one that also offers a lens for rethinking the mundane data operations belonging to systems here on Earth.
Ella Klik is an assistant professor in the Hermeneutics & Culture graduate program at Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests span media theory and history, materiality, and aesthetics. She is the PI of Imagining Data Futures: From DNA to Outer Space, a project considering emerging storage systems and their spatial expansion, fables of temporal endurance, and promises of compression ad minimum. She is the author of Negative Media: Erasure and the Limits of Retention (2026), and her work has appeared in New Media & Society, Television & Media Studies, and Journal of Visual Culture.
This talk argues that the access and assistive technologies landscape is best understood through concepts of intervention, ephemerality, and obsolescence.
As state‑led models of access merge with big tech’s definitions of accessibility, disabled users increasingly encounter deletion: the withdrawal of support, the sunsetting of services, and the erosion of once‑promised infrastructures. Once short‑term project research funding concludes, a slate of assistive technologies from home‑monitoring systems, adaptive AI tools, and smart environments lose functionality once projects conclude, leaving disabled people with systems that cannot be updated, repaired, or meaningfully integrated into daily life. This plays out at a global scale, when civil society and technology collaborate around a banner of ‘tech for good’; in one instance, cochlear implants marketed as permanent solutions become partially unusable when companies discontinue software support (Friedner, 2022), leaving families unable to afford required upgrades and cutting children off from essential infrastructures of communication.
The promise of inclusion by technologies intended to support participation in education, work, and health care are therefore time-bound and isolated initiatives caught up in development models that are focused on singular products, marketability, and pre-determined problem-solution dynamics. These models run contrary to the continued need for care, repair, and maintenance that sustain access, particularly as longevity and specialisation remain structurally undervalued and economically unprofitable (Mattern 2018). The contradictions of the realities of disabled people and their structural needs cannot be sustained by market logics of profit, innovation, and scale. We argue that instead, the access landscape is engineered for ephemerality, where deletion is not a malfunction but an expectation. Access becomes an intervention into the everyday lives of disabled people, with no expectation of sustained care or change that should accompany state-led projects.
Dr Louise Hickman is an activist and scholar of communication whose work explores how access is materially and socially produced for disabled people. She employs ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to examine the politics of access. Her research is grounded in feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies. It investigates how access is co-produced through human (often feminised) labour, technological systems, and economic infrastructures.
In the last decade, we have seen continued new cycles of digital media technologies that stimulated mediated human interaction resulting in a growing volume of personal digital records. On a daily basis, we post, share, upload, send and store thousands and thousands of pictures, text messages, videos and recorded audio conversations. Anxiety about data abundance is counteracted by a fear about the ephemerality of our personal data. Personal data loss happens all the time, because our phones stop working, our cloud storage service becomes inaccessible, online social media platforms disappear, or the software supporting the reading of a format becomes obsolete.
Our contemporary digital culture is thus marked by a striking contradiction. On the one hand, we are told that “the internet forgets nothing”: our photos, posts, messages, and search histories persist indefinitely, resurfacing years later in unexpected contexts. On the other hand, archivists have warned of a coming “digital dark age,” in which personal and cultural records may disappear due to technological obsolescence, platform shutdowns, and hardware failure. The result is a profound asymmetry. Individuals struggle to delete what they would prefer forgotten, yet struggle equally to preserve what they value.
To retain some agency in this ecosystem of abundance, we explore the question whether or not we need to become active data stewards of our personal digital archive. Does it help us when we acquire some level of data management skills that seems to be so much more advanced then more traditional curatorial practices related to analogue memory practices, such as scrapbooking, domestic photography or home movie making. In order to understand better the challenges related to these what Jean Burgess described as “everyday data cultures” (Burgess, 2021), we need to understand the everyday complexities of individuals dealing with the messiness of personal archiving.
Susan Aasman holds the Aletta Jacobs Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Groningen (RUG). Her field of expertise is in media history, especially in web history, digital archives, digital cultural heritage, and the history of amateur media technologies. Recent relevant publications include: The Routledge Companion to Transnational Web Archive Studies (co-edited with Anat Ben-David and Niels Brügger); “An ecologically just future for personal digital heritage: three guiding statements”, in Archival Science (co-authored with Miedema, M., Beaulieu, A. & Sauer); and Amateur Media and Participatory Culture: Film, Video and Digital Media, Routledge (co-authored with Motrescu-Mayes).
As our social world grapples with multiple, intersecting forms of grief, the increasing prevalence of “data deletion” events has emerged as a novel form of suffering specific to our time. These range from the removal of critical, publicly funded federal environmental data during political regime change, to the loss of irreplaceable cultural archives when a hosting server shuts down (Joselow, 2025; Osvath, 2018).
This presentation unfurls the emergent and novel conceptual framework of “data loss grief,” a form of disenfranchised, affective, and sensorial loss that exists outside the bounds of social recognition, experienced when personal virtual possessions disappear through non-consensual yet sanctioned acts of “data deletion.” This occurs through the positioning of data valuation as a fluctuating, shifting target, subject to devaluation and eventual disposal based on the revenue-generating incentives of platform companies. These instances of “data loss” reveal and replicate inherited structures of racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983). Ultimately, this demonstrates that when platform owners discontinue services under the profit-driven rationale of globally integrated systems of techno-capitalism, emotionally burdened digital lifeworlds can destabilize users’ livelihoods and sense of dignity.
Identifying encounters of “data loss” as a form of “grief” invites us to consider how these experiences transform into “grievances.” Drawing on anti-colonial reckonings of dispossession and subjugation that advocate for generating knowledge from the vantage point of the undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2012), this shift invites recognition of “loss” as an embodied, felt impact. To affirm a “grievance” is to produce actionable testimony about a sociotechnical condition: when we have a grievance, we act and seek change.
The transformation of “grief” into “grievance” motivates users and communities to devise ad hoc workarounds, hacks, maneuvers, tools, and systems that respond to the effects of this loss, often well before any coordinated institutional response. These practices operate as a form of “articulation work” (Star and Strauss, 1999). This paper focuses on two components: outlining the theoretical, historical, and methodological grounding of “data loss grief,” and sharing emerging findings from participatory focus group research tracing patterns in “data deletion” events alongside user-developed techniques for grappling with the weight of "data loss.
Melissa Vincent is a music journalist and doctoral candidate in the Data, Networks, and Society program in the Media and Communications department at the London School of Economics. She was a researcher for the Peabody-winning documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story and was nominated for a Digital Publishing Award for Best Science and Technology Storytelling. She is a frequent music correspondent for CBC’s The National, a member of the Toronto Music Advisory Committee, and a former Polaris Music Prize jury foreperson. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Elle Canada, The Globe and Mail, Billboard, NPR Music, and The Fader, among others.
In machine learning and information theory, noise is typically defined as an unwanted intrusion into a signal—an error to be minimized, filtered, or regularized. Yet artistic practice demonstrates that negation, erasure, and destabilization can become sources of invention. This paper examines artmaking as a recursive process of noise magnification that produces difference within repetition, situating creative emergence at the edge of chaos and collapse. Two extreme aesthetic and epistemological cases anchor this argument: optical feedback in analogue video synthesis and model collapse in AI systems.
In optical feedback, a camera pointed at its own monitor synthesizes reflexive patterns in which noise functions as both input and effect, the former driving the system toward stochastic variation and increasing formal complexity in the latter, potentially leading to chaos. In model collapse, recursive training on a model’s own outputs progressively erases coherence, resulting in word repetition, pixel noise, and formal simplification until the system ultimately breaks down through self-referential iteration.
Both situations reveal how erasure operates within recursive processes. Chaos disrupts a given configuration through the influx of noise, while collapse emerges when a system is deprived of such input and gradually exhausts itself. In artistic terms, what is partially erased to be reinvented is a prior state of homeostasis—which may be a canon, a previous work within a series, or a particular style, among others.
Drawing on media theory and archaeology, cybernetics, and information theory, this paper thus argues that such extreme conditions illuminate how creative emergence occurs through the destabilization of established forms, from the avant-gardes to generative AI. By privileging instability over control, this recursive perspective reframes negation—whether through chaos or collapse—not as the failure of aesthetic systems, but as one of the conditions through which difference effectively arises from repetition.
Violaine Boutet de Monvel is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific assistant in the Machine Visual Culture group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. She previously taught in the Film & Media Studies Department at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, where she earned her PhD in 2025 with a dissertation titled From Video Feedback to Generative AI: On Recursivity in the Arts and Media. She has developed a definition of art as noise magnification, reframing the engineering bias of information theory.
A recent surge of scholarly neologisms such as „techno-feudalism“, „data colonialism“, and „intellectual monopoly capitalism“ testifies to the urgency of understanding and addressing the current socio-economic crisis, driven by Big Tech's violently avaricious and acquisitive behavior, which has only been exacerbated by the advent of AI. Instead of quitting the online sphere altogether, a wider conscience of the necessity to reclaim autonomy over our machines and cyberspace has emerged. This has fostered a recent resurgence of interest in FOSS, hacker, and DIY/DIWO maker culture more broadly: vibrant communities that have quietly co-existed on the margins of mainstream culture since the dawn of the internet, emphasizing self-sufficiency (rather than dependency on commercial services), craftiness (the ability to build and repair machines) and free circulation of knowledge within the community.
My paper aims to explore two growing artivist communities that testify to the return of technē in the creative field: independent film laboratories, which are dedicated to preserving the know-how of now-commercially obsolete celluloid, and the glitch art community, which deconstructs the digital imperative of functionality through the creative exploitation of computer bugs and errors. Though they appear as opposing analog/digital binaries in recurrent debates, both actively challenge digital „update culture“, its black-boxed rhetoric of immateriality and its clean, high-definition aesthetics, reclaiming hands-on, curious, and creative engagement with the machines.
Through analysis of representative works (hand-processed celluloid and datamoshed videos), public discourse (manifestos), mechanisms of knowledge-sharing and community sustainability (workshops, forums), this paper examines how collectives like Paris-based L'Abominable and the international Glitch Artists Collective cultivate „low-tech, high-technics culture“ while forging material resistance to techno-capitalist ideology.
Ejla Kovačević is a PhD fellow at the University Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis, where she conducts research on experimental film collectives, focusing in particular on independent film laboratories and glitch art communities, under the supervision of Christa Blümlinger. Alongside her academic work, she is active as a freelance film programmer and has collaborated with several international festivals, including 25 FPS, Kinoskop Analog Experimental Film Festival, Fubar Glitch Art Festival, and Process Analog Film Festival. She is currently a member of the curatorial team of Collectif Jeune Cinéma and Festival des cinémas différents et expérimentaux in Paris.
For the past two decades, infrastructure has emerged as its own critical sub-field in media studies. The emergence of critical infrastructure studies is intuitive in a contemporary media landscape defined by a perennial sense of crisis. Infrastructures give form to the planetary and the local, provide a point of articulation for the traversals of the micro and the macro, and offer a convergence of the discursive and the material for contemporary media scholars. What has dominated this nascent sub-field have been accounts of infrastructure – from data clouds to streaming platforms to LLMs – as an object of critique. This work has been invaluable in making visible and legible the foundational work of media infrastructures. Our paper, however, moves beyond infrastructure as an object of critique and explores infrastructure as a method for building alternative systems of circulation outside the extractive dynamics of platform capitalism.
Building on fieldwork with 9 DIY radio stations across the UK, we explore how these stations have emerged as a response to a fractured and privatized media landscape. Like other noncommercial and insurgent forms of broadcast, DIY radio stations are entry points into creative industries for young people and their lower barriers to entry are especially significant for groups historically excluded or under-represented in music and related industries. We use this paper as an exploratory intervention into critical infrastructure and media studies while also developing a conceptual framework to position DIY Radio within a larger media landscape and their underappreciated role in fostering new cultural, political, and interpersonal infrastructures.
Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature and a founding member of the Infrastructure Humanities Group, where he leads a grant titled Archiving Community: Small Scale Online Radio and Social Infrastructure. This paper is co-authored with Dr Paul Rekret, School of Media and Communication, University of Westminster.
The paper introduces and conceptualises the author’s image-based participatory web art practice that deals with deletion and data rot as a methodology of making and inquiry into the aesthetics of decay and disappearance, and an intercultural sense of wabi sabi. Wabi sabi is a Japanese-derived aesthetic concept concerning imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness (Koren, 2015).
The author will reflect on his artworks from two periods and their changing contextual implications. 3 Years and 6 Months of Digital Decay (2016-2019) and forgetting.online (2017) reflected on what Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (2011) envisaged as the paradoxical and emancipatory potential of digital deletion and digital forgetting, and the works dealt with how digital art practice expands on the poetic aesthetics of deleting, data-rewriting, active and creative software rot and socio-technical forgetting, which seemed to be futile yet it provided relevant contextual and discursive visibility critically through aesthetic experience.
The author’s more recent work, trashpicking.cloud (2024), recontextualised the poetic aspect of participatory deletion and digital decay in relation to its decarbonising potential, i.e. the more lightweight a website can become, the less energy consumption and carbon emissions each website-load could potentially produce (Abbing, 2021/Uriarte, 2023). Discursively, recently deletion has become increasingly futile for privacy and against online tracking and profiling, with omnipresent datafication through online and IRL media, data-scraping and generative AI.
The carbon emissions of digital technology have been increasingly made visible as problematic in the age of the climate crisis. Yet deleting small data can induce the sense of futility, as the scale of carbon emissions inflates for institutional and upscaled usage, such as the energy-hungry Gen-AI’s data centres by Big Tech. The paper proposes that creative activation of futility seen in the artworks can still be mobilised for making visible and communicating contextual problematics, such as climate issues, through creating alternative modes of aesthetic engagement, away from divisive (Latour et al., 2020) mainstream modes of communication, such as social media.
Shinji Toya (FHEA/MA/BA) is an artist based in London. He works as an Associate Lecturer on the MA Art and Science programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL). His practice is based on participatory digital image-making and focuses on creating modes of association with technology that make visible the social problematics brought about by digital technology. Academically, he has presented at xCoAx 2025, the 15th International Illustration Research Symposium, and CreaTech 2023. He was part of the AHRC-funded research project More-Than-Human Design Through Critical Climate Computing at UAL. He has presented his art projects at the V&A South Kensington (2024), Tate Britain (2019), and Ars Electronica (2018).
2026 seems to have ushered in something of a vibe shift in the affective relationship between users and platforms. In the face of toxic platform cultures, rampant misinformation, deepfakes and a deluge of brainrot and AI slop, users and content producers have called for a ‘Great Meme Reset’ (Placido 2026), with commentators declaring 2026 ‘the year of analogue’ (Maskell 2026) and predicting the emergence of an ‘anti-brainrot movement’ (Jordan 2026). These responses register diffuse desires for an exit from the terms of enshittified social media use, yet they largely remain within platform logics and vernaculars.
This paper examines TikTok trends indexed to these calls to delete, reset, or rewind one’s social media presence, including ‘2026 is the new 2016’, ‘Nostalgiamaxxing’, ‘Resetting the FYP’, and ‘Locking in’. Rather than full-scale deletion, these examples enact what I describe as weak negations: aesthetic and affective tactics that stage withdrawal from within the feed. For example, ‘nostalgiamaxxing’ and ‘2026 is the new 2016’ aestheticise the past as a form of relief by making the feed look and feel like it predates an era of data suffocation. ‘Resetting the FYP’ frames deletion as an adaptive strategy of partial erasure directed at algorithmic systems rather than human audiences. ‘Locking into Reality’ videos, recast deletion as collective participation within, rather than exit from, the feed.
While they are not resistance in a traditional sense, these tactics share a Barthesian quality of suspension that introduces friction into systems designed to exploit user attachment and dependency. Drawing on Barthes’s concept of the Neutral and Lauren Berlant’s account of lateral agency, I argue that weak negations are minor, ambient efforts to recalibrate the terms of visibility and legibility that govern how the algorithm interprets the subject and how the subject experiences the algorithm in an age of data suffocation.
Dr Tina Kendall is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Her research explores film, digital media and cultural theory with a particular focus on ‘minor’ affects such as boredom, disgust, and apathy in contemporary media environments. She is the author of Entertained or Else: Boredom and Networked Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) and has published on extreme cinema, platform cultures and internet aesthetics.
In this paper, I will critically engage with the questions of who gets to delete, what gets deleted, and with what consequences? Across Western Europe, it has become increasingly common for smartphones to be confiscated, screened, and scraped for data when assessing the legitimacy of an asylum claim. Wrapped up in a larger geopolitical landscape of suspicion, the smartphone has become the ultimate 'truth-telling' device – used to cross-check information, point out inconsistencies in testimonies, and uphold a hostile politics of exclusion. In this context, it is well known that those seeking asylum across Europe engage in practices of deletion: from ‘small’ forms of deletion such as erasing text messages or search histories, to ‘bigger’ forms of deletion such as getting rid of smartphones or systematically scraping their digital footprints.
In this paper, I examine deletion, not simply as an act of erasure, but as an ambivalent tactic of negotiating a politics of suspicion that is at the heart of datafied asylum systems (Maalsen, 2023). This paper does not seek to prescribe any moral judgement upon these practises, but instead aims to explore what acts of deletion do in a context where state surveillance systems can now (1) infer across absences and gaps in data, and (2) retrospectively recover deleted data through mobile forensics.
To delete in this context is to be enrolled into a politics of suspicion: where absences, discontinuities, and gaps in digital traces are actively re-constructed and re-interpreted as indicators of suspicion, inconsistency, and deception (Amoore, 2020). By foregrounding how deletion (and the absences it produces) becomes evidentiary, this paper reconceptualises deletion as a productive form of negation that operates in an ambivalent space between resistance and surveillance. It argues that contemporary asylum regimes do not simply rely on the accumulation of data, but on the uneven interpretation of its absence, through which deletion itself becomes legible within an apparatus of suspicion.
Dr Hannah Morgan is a Career Development Research Fellow in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Her work centres around the politics of digitalisation within the UK's asylum system.
The history of the Chinese internet is marked by disruption and disappearance. Content takedowns, shadow banning, and permanent account deactivation, enacted through what Zhao (2024) conceptualizes as "algorithmic camouflage" — wherein platforms perform tolerance while covertly restricting marginalized voices — have become normalized features of feminist digital life. Netizens sardonically name this constellation of punitive platform measures the "grand and spectacular cyber funeral" (fengguang dazang). Existing scholarship has examined the creative and democratic potential of digital remembering under censorship (Chen & Cheng, 2025; Yang & Wu, 2018), how feminists deploy guerrilla-style and masquerading tactics to evade censorship before erasure occurs (Han & Lee, 2018; Han, 2018; Tan, 2017), and how permanently banned feminists navigate enforced disappearance as cyber living ghosts in its aftermath (Shao & He, 2024). However, few studies critically examine the flexibility and creativity of grassroots feminist digital memory-making practices — specifically, how feminists make supposedly diminished media texts immortal, and how they construct collective memory about gender-related issues erased by both platforms and the state. Building upon the concept of connected memory (Hoskins, 2016) and the digital condition (Stalder, 2018), this study develops the concept of affectively codified memory to capture the emotionally charged, creatively encoded, and collectively relayed forms of memory-(re)making that grassroot feminists employ to preserve and circulate feminist knowledge and history under censorship. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews and textual analysis of social media posts of grassroot feminists on Xiaohongshu, I found four distinct and interconnected archiving tactics feminists use in the process of capture, storage, retrieval, remaking of memory on the Chinese internet. This research argues that while censorship suppresses freedom of expression and intends to achieve public amnesia, grassroots digital feminists relay memories across platforms, genres, and bodies to achieve cyber immortality and amplify the reach of erased events. In doing so, they transform the "cyber funeral" into a site of affective solidarity, creative resistance, and enduring feminist worldmaking. This illuminates how ordinary feminists navigate and contest the deep uncertainties of digital life under authoritarianism — contributing to our understanding of how the Chinese internet is simultaneously shaped by, and actively reshaping, the era of uncertainty.
Qianqian Li is a PhD candidate in Communications and Media at the University of Exeter. She holds an MA in Digital Culture & Society from King’s College London. Her research interests include digital culture and society, digital feminism, and social movements in authoritarian contexts. Her PhD project focuses on feminist consumer politics and social media politics in China.
Governments often delete to control what gets remembered (McCammon, 2022, 2025). This paper argues that deletion does something else: on occasion, it forges relational networks capable of resisting and undermining the aims of authoritarian political actors.
In 2025, a government social media strategist in the United States contacted me to report that a political directive had ordered her to delete content from federal platforms that the Trump administration had deemed ideologically inconvenient. She had heard of me through a public records request I had filed years earlier, seeking records of deleted tweets from a different agency under a different administration. When that request crossed her desk, I had been looking for evidence of erasure. Years later, facing an order to delete, she remembered me and reached out.
When I received her email, I was navigating what felt like a paranoid position (Sedgwick, 1997), a fear that all government records were imperiled and that acts of erasure were unfolding faster than anyone could ever document them. As civic initiatives scrambled to preserve public data, I found myself less interested in preserving social media posts than in understanding the people ordered to delete them. What were their fears, their values, and what did they think I should be doing as a researcher? I began conducting semi-structured interviews with people responsible for deletion and with those whose words, images, and institutional histories had been erased.
Drawing on approximately 1,800 public records requests filed across multiple political administrations and interviews with current and former government workers, this paper argues that deletion carries profound relational consequences that scholars have largely overlooked. The people ordered to carry erasure out sometimes become the witnesses most capable of resisting it. The analysis is historically and politically situated (Mettler and Lieberman, 2020), but it gestures towards the broader, global relational dimensions that deletion begets.
Muira McCammon is an assistant professor in Tulane University’s Department of Communication and holds a courtesy appointment at Tulane Law School. She researches government communication, archival absence within democratic institutions, and the politics of media technologies, and is particularly interested in the relationship between deletion and distrust. McCammon holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and a Master of Laws from Penn Carey Law. Her research on ephemerality, absence, and redaction has appeared in a number of journals, including New Media & Society, Internet Histories, and Information, Communication & Society.
The intersection of generative artificial intelligence and documentary practice represents a profound ontological shift in how the moving image functions as a witness to human life. At the heart of this transition lies a new methodological framework — re-generative realism — which seeks to reconcile the indexical history of the documentary form with the synthetic possibilities of the current algorithmic condition. The in-progress film An AIary for Kaia, structured as a contemporary response to Humphrey Jennings' 1945 A Diary for Timothy, serves as a critical case study.
Where Jennings utilized a newborn and four representative workers to symbolize post-war reconstruction, An AIary for Kaia follows the first months of a child's life during a period of global unraveling in early 2026. The film operates under a foundational constraint: Kaia's likeness never appears. In an era when a child's biometric data is extracted even before birth, this withholding functions as a deliberate act of deletion within an image-extractive environment. Combining screen recordings and personal footage with AI-generated proxies, the film treats re-generation not as replacement but as legible deletion to mark what is withheld from exploitive systems.
This paper examines the ethics and aesthetics of substituting a child's likeness with AI proxies as a practic of negation and resistance within an image economy that renders deletion increasingly futile, yet necessary. It also confronts the project's inherent contradiction: the protective AI was trained on the unconsented images of millions of other children. By focusing on this contradiction and the global "ghost work" powering the AI supply chain, the project maps the distributed complicity among the intimate domestic sphere, digital labor, and the geopolitical condition that make both possible.
Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker and media researcher who has produced nearly 400 video essays. He pioneered the “desktop documentary” format with his award-winning Transformers: The Premake. His work has screened at MoMA, the Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and has been featured in The New York Times and on Mubi. He is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), where he co-leads the SNSF project The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies. His latest film, Afterlives, recently premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and DocLisboa.
This paper examines deletion not as a simple technical act of removing content, but as a form of invisible labour embedded in AI-mediated workplace communication. In AI-assisted writing, the main work lies not in generating text, but in transforming generated text into something usable in professional contexts. This involves continuous acts of subtraction: removing inaccuracies, generic phrasing, inappropriate tone, stylistic excess, and the recognisable traces of AI itself. Deletion therefore emerges not as a secondary act of correction, but as a routine form of labour through which workplace communication is made credible, acceptable, and fit for circulation. Yet this labour is rarely visible. What remains visible is the polished final output, while the human work of prompting, editing, checking, and rewriting disappears from view. Deletion thus operates on two levels: within the text itself, and through the erasure of the background labour that makes AI-mediated communication possible.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with women working in tech, the paper suggests that this hidden work is shaped by gendered expectations around tone, care, professionalism, and self-presentation. Here, deletion is not only about correcting AI-generated text, but about deciding what can remain, what must go, and what kind of voice is acceptable at work. Trimming back the polished certainty or generic tone of AI output can also become a way of reasserting human judgment and holding AI at a distance. What deletion brings into view is not only the labour behind AI-mediated communication but the uneven ways its costs are carried, negotiated, and sometimes refused.
Kamile Develi Uzgun is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds whose work examines AI-mediated communication in professional settings, situated at the intersection of gender studies, workplace communication, and feminist STS. Her research project focuses particularly on women in tech, exploring questions of digital labour, professional identity, workplace culture, and the social shaping of communication technologies. Alongside her doctoral work, she leads seminars and teaches undergraduate students in media and communication.
Post-Generative Artificial Intelligence, the internet is overrun with “AI slop” (Koebler, 2025): low-value, sometimes bizarre, often-meaningless algorithmically generated content. This paper enters the slopscape to take stock of what form strategies of artistic resistance to AI might take in our post-GenAI digital culture.
It begins by outlining two interlinked propositions. First, the automated use of probabilistic models to produce novel cultural content represents a “qualitative shift in how meaning is produced and circulated” in society (Berry, 2025: 5260). By creating a “verification crisis” whereby we can no longer be certain of media’s origins, the spread of AI slop creates a condition of “epistemic uncertainty” (5264): as our trust in the origin of media declines, so does our capacity to produce a stable, shared reality. Slop accelerates a sense of epistemic derangement, unmooring reality from lived experience.
But while the deluge of slop and its deranging effects are novel, their effects are not entirely new. The internet – digital culture – was already a vector of derangement before Generative AI disrupted its operations that circulated low-quality content, spam, fake news, and conspiracist politics through mainstream culture. Second, Generative AI represents an extension of technologies – e.g., platforms – that have been automating the production of “meaningless” content for years; they simply accelerate and spectacularise the internet’s contentification, or the circulation of content for its own sake.
Via an engagement with Michael Mandiberg’s Taking Stock series (2024), this paper concludes by arguing that artistic resistance to AI has to grasp digital culture in all its banal, meaningless, empty glory: a space mostly populated with generic content that constitutes the vast bulk of digital culture. “Content” has always been an empty form ordering a pernicious set of social relations. The critical (Offert and Dhaliwal, 2025) and epistemological question we ought to ask is, rather, what aesthetic form might produce better.
Scott Wark is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research combines an interest in theoretical approaches to media and culture with analyses of digital cultural phenomena, media infrastructures, data processing, artificial intelligence, and techniques of racialisation. He is co-editor of Figure: Concept and Method (with Celia Lury and William Viney; Palgrave, 2022) and ‘Pharmacologies of Media’, a special issue of Media Theory (with Yiğit Soncul).
The enormous needs of AI-supporting data centers when it comes to resources like energy and water, which brought along a new round of promotion of the nuclear energy (this time through its reconceptualization as “sustainable”, e.g. through a recent relevant classification by the EU Commission), makes rather urgent the study of what is saved and what is deleted when it comes to data. Our presentation will focus on how the issue of what to preserve and what to delete has been discussed in a global community of prime importance, that of computer science and engineering. It will be based on a symptomatic reading of leading journals of this community (like the journals published by the two largest international societies of this field, the Association of Computing Machinery, ACM, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, IEEE) of the last two decades, which pays attention to both computer science/engineering discourses and silences regarding the environmental and other costs of the expansive accumulation of data, an accumulation intensified in the context of the recent history of Artificial Intelligence. In the words of a 2026 article published in an ACM journal, our presentation will focus on the “Many Faces of Data Deletion: On the Significance and Implications on Deleting Data” (Marco Perez et al., ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 58, Issue 7, 2026).
Aristotle Tympas (MSc in Chemical Engineering, Aristotelio University, Greece; PhD in History-Sociology of Technology, Georgia Tech, US) is Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) and Director of its STS programme. He has published a series of books and articles on the history and sociology of presenting computing machines as intelligent.
Vasilis Giannoulis is an experienced systems analyst undertaking dissertation-related research on Big Data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence from the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA).
Elli Danae Vartziotis holds engineering degrees from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US. She is undertaking dissertation-related research on Big Data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence from the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA).
Deletion is a key function of data infrastructures, yet a neglected dimension of digital preservation. As historic record shifts toward the digital, I propose digital deaccessioning – deletion in the archive – as both a critical lens to evaluate data sovereignty and a mechanism to assert digital rights.
With this framework, I evaluate digital preservation products on the basis of deletion competencies. I describe how capital and empire destabilize archival practice and ensnare collective memory into brittle, fragmented financial instruments with little regard for history beyond its potential to raise venture capital. Archives increasingly depend on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools to preserve records, ceding custody to 3rd-party vendors borne out of commercial, judicial, and financial sectors (e.g. AWS, Microsoft Azure). These dependencies persist across local and global archives, consigning the world’s biggest collections (e.g. NARA, LOC, JSTOR) to regimes of opaque pricing, “early deletion” fees, and prohibitively costly data migration. The software economy does not steward our history, it holds it hostage. Conditions of deletion reveal how the enduring hegemonies which undergird archival practice now manifest in novel and invisible ways.
Storage vendors are selected for their capacity to accumulate data, seldom for their commitment to delete it. Here, I propose deletion as a preservation framework. When archivists prioritize deletion, we turn toward more sustainable and ethical digital practices: digital restitution, data mobility, community tech, free and open source software (FOSS). Such frameworks are indispensable for marginalized histories, for which surveillance and extraction are a constant threat in and out of the database. Citing concepts from critical archival studies, indigenous data governance, and technocriticism, I propose deletion-informed archival practice, advocating for explicit mentions of deletion in deaccessioning policies, Trusted Data Repository (TDR) checklists, and vendor agreements. Deletion is the avenue through which reparative archival concepts can be asserted digitally. Deletion sustains preservation.
Ven Qiu is an archivist and creative technologist based in New York, co-parented by Chinese immigrants and the internet. As a memory worker committed to data sovereignty, Qiu conceptualizes deletion as a mechanism through which sociopolitical and infrastructural conditions of memory become legible, including digital colonialism, platform capitalism, and neoliberalism. These concerns materialise in their archive, Dump Site, a digital repository of deleted media. Currently pursuing an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at New York University, Qiu’s practice combines archival methods, critical study, and creative practice to explore the politics and textures of memory.
“I am a non-deletionist. I archive everything” [Lütgert 2008]. With this statement, Sebastian Lütgert expresses one of the founding principles of Pad.ma, an autonomous and highly annotated archive of videos coming primarily from India. Pad.ma, among the many others that flourished from this initial project (0xdb.org, indiancine.ma, https://bak.ma, https://858.ma), keeps growing in a collaborative tension towards abundance. An opportunity that was, in the first place, welcomed by the advent of the digital.
On February 1st, 2025, a new announcement was published on UbuWeb. Despite their initial decision to shutter the archive after 30 years, considering it complete, they stated: “with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu." Archiving is, therefore, a form of resistance against “the annihilation of the memory of the world.” [UbuWeb 2025].
Autonomous archiving poses questions on maintenance and on the ecological impact of streaming. One response to these tensions is the aesthetic and political strategy of “low-resolution.” Laura U. Marks calls for the low-res as a way of creating “sustainable infrastructure that will survive when more bloated infrastructure fails” [Marks 2025]. Low-res images—as those inhabiting the archives mentioned above—are just the tips of the icebergs: while being a trace of a physical loss of information, there we can find nuances, latent histories.
A further issue, raised by Robert Rapoport, is the possible and uncontrolled use of this abundance of materials to train algorithms. As the “ecstatic overproduction” [Liang 2015] “tacitly invites increasing automation in indexing” [Rapoport 2015], would the archive be ultimately visible by a sole non-human spectator, the machine?
The paper proposes a reflection on the tension between archiving and deleting as a political, aesthetic, ecological and technological choice in autonomous digital archiving. I ask: What does deleting entail in an archive where the clips are organized beyond a hierarchical order of value? How might non-deletion function as a counter to power-driven acts of erasure in contemporary times?
Flavia Mazzarino obtained her Master’s degree in Visual Arts from Iuav University in Venice and the HfG Karlsruhe, with a thesis on Harun Farocki. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Università della Svizzera Italiana under the supervision of Kevin B. Lee, with whom she has taught courses on video essays, audiovisual futures, and film festivals. Flavia co-organises the Future of Cinema conference at the Locarno Film Festival and co-edits the corresponding book series. Since 2021, she has collaborated with Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, producing his four most recent films, including "A Fidai Film" (2024) and "With Hasan in Gaza" (2025).
If, as Mary Oliver once wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion” today, our attention is more valuable than ever, yet its connection with devotion is even more tenuous. Ironically, this quote circulates in earnest memes on contaminated platforms like Instagram, where one is flooded with images and incentivised to doom scroll past without as much as a like or save. Commodification of our attention through surveillance capitalism has made attention a scarce and prized resource—making distraction, the enemy of attention, the defining mode of our age.
As conservators of contemporary art, design, and media our practice centres around preserving, sustaining, and reactivating legacy media and technologies. In our private lives, we're well aware of the frictions inherent in preserving and using “obsolete” tech amid today’s mind- bogglingly fast paced digital churn. As educators teaching the next generations of conservators, we also struggle to teach the capacity for attention (much less its harder-to-grasp corollary, reverence or devotion), among the technical, historical, and social skills needed to work in the heritage field.
This talk considers attention and its enemy distraction as aspects of a feminist ethics of care and repair, pointing to the need for intentional attentiveness as a form of political action. In the rarefied practices of art conservation, we find a fertile ground for short circuiting and queering techno-capitalist narratives of obsolescence. If neoliberalism and techno-capitalism seek frictionlessness and seamlessness in their quest for total capture of our attention, attention becomes the last bastion of our revolt against its current stranglehold on digital culture. We explore the potentials of affirming and cultivating friction, slowness, attentiveness, and attunement in our practices—from methodologies of close looking to deep and anti-colonial listening practices.
Brian Castriota is Lecturer in Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media at University College London (2023–) and Time-Based Media Conservator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2018–). From 2018 to 2026 he was Time-Based Media Conservator at the National Galleries Scotland and previously held lecturer positions at the University of Glasgow and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He has published widely on conservation theory and practice, examining how ideas from poststructuralism, queer theory, and agential realism rework sedimented practices of conservation, particularly in relation to contemporary art, its musealisation, and its documentation for conservation purposes.
Jessica Walthew is Associate Lecturer in Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media at University College London and is concurrently completing a PhD at the University of Glasgow researching “plastics’ lifetimes” and the relationship between plastics conservation and sustainability discourses in heritage. She was a conservator at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum from 2017 to 2025. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary materials and digital collections, with special attention to instability in the history and theory of conservation. She is co-author of Conservation of Design: Prototypes to Afterlives (co-authored with Sarah Barack, Kate Wight Tyler, and Joy Bloser; expected summer 2026, Archetype Press).
This paper interrogates exoplanetary deep-time archiving as a terminal form of epistemic violence, one that encapsulates the eschatological and geopolitical tensions inherent in after-human, deep-time curation. I examine the analogue return as a tactical retreat to physical media, specifically nanofiche technology, where microscopic data is laser-etched into nickel plates to ensure legibility under optical magnification for millions of years. Driven by entities such as the Arch Mission Foundation, NASA’s CLPS program, and Astrobotic, these initiatives align with longtermist ideologies that position the current "digital dark age" as an existential threat. By inscribing a curated "civilization backup" onto the lunar regolith, these lunar payload missions perform a final act of epistemicide, unilaterally determining which subjectivities are granted permanence and which are relegated to entropy.
Such grand endeavours are not unprecedented, yet the pursuit of digital immortality has repeatedly reached a material dead end, exemplified by the rapid degradation of the 1986 BBC Domesday Project; off-Earth, this vulnerability is compounded by a cosmic environment far more hostile to digital infrastructure due to solar flares and background radiation.
Finally, I offer a materialist critique of waste as the most enduring human legacy, echoing Nicolas de Warren's concept of "homo-detritus". As demonstrated by the 2019 crash of the Beresheet lander and its unintended dispersal of both inorganic and biological matter, the ultimate archive was subverted, and the attempt to petrify humanity in a permanent medium resulted instead in the irreparable contamination of the lunar surface. In this context, the longtermist project is revealed to be less an act of preservation than one of cosmic littering but a final, exclusionary projection of power that prioritizes a sterilized future over the material and manifold realities of the present that escapes absolute capture.
Mariana Marangoni is a computational artist and researcher based in London, currently a PhD student at the UAL Creative Computing Institute and Lecturer on the MA Interaction Design programme at the London College of Communication. Her work focuses on critically examining digital materiality and its socio-ecological implications through a wide range of media, including installations, web-based experiments, and visual poetry. Recent work has focused on reimagining computational paradigms for an increasingly exhausted planet. Among other venues, she has given talks and exhibited internationally at the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), Rhizome, Ars Electronica (AT), Mesh Festival (CH), transmediale (DE), and AMRO (AT).
This talk examines how contemporary AI systems are shaped by multiple forms of erasure while simultaneously relying on histories, practices, and communities they often render invisible. Drawing on critical disability studies, media theory, and critical AI studies, I argue that synthetic media is built upon statistical renderings that inherit longer histories of normalization, classification, and exclusion. Beyond questions of algorithmic bias, generative AI reproduces forms of erasure that obscure the labor of data annotation, the embodied realities of disability, and the multimodal practices of translation developed by, and for, disabled communities.
In response to Hito Steyerl's theorization of “mean images”, I propose a crip theory of AI centered on the concept of the kin image. While AI companies increasingly celebrate multimodality as a technological breakthrough, disabled people have long transformed images into text, sound into language, and sensory experience into accessible forms of communication. Yet these histories of access labor—from alt-text production to semantic description—have been largely erased from dominant narratives of AI innovation, even as they provide the foundations for contemporary multimodal systems.
By tracing the relationship between disability, multimodality, and data labor, I show how AI depends upon forms of knowledge and care it simultaneously marginalizes. Rather than treating disability as a problem to be solved, a crip perspective invites us to imagine alternative futures grounded in kinship, embodied knowledge, and creative forms of access that resist the logic of extraction, optimization, and erasure.
Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Yale University. Before joining Yale, she taught at Colgate University and served as an Assistant Editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). She earned a PhD from New York University and an MA from Columbia University.Her work focuses on digital culture, film and media, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. Her analysis of buffering revealed the understudied ways in which latency and delay are inherent to digital systems and infrastructures. Her first book, Failure (Polity, 2020), co-authored with Arjun Appadurai, reveals how Silicon Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness. Her second book, Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies (Duke University Press, 2025), explores four ubiquitous interface design features—refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and Night Shift—to develop a theory of digital debility. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate what can be gained from placing the non-average user at the center of media history.
Drawing from his new book Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine (University of Minnesota Press), Thomas Dekeyser pushes against teleological narratives of technological history, revealing the oft-perplexing and stubborn existence of a tenacious urge to negate life's technologization. From early machine breakers in ancient Greece to ultra-leftist armed assaults on capitalist computation in 1980s France, the extension of the technical realm has been inextricably tied up with political struggles over who counts as human and whose lives are worth saving. This talk will present a series of techno-abolitionist theses for thinking and confronting our technological predicament.
Thomas Dekeyser is currently a Lecturer in Human Geography and a filmmaker at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. His research examines theories and practices of power & refusal in changing technological environments. He is the author of Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machines (U of Minnesota Press, 2026) which The New Yorker described as a “provocative and enjoyable… inspiration for thinking against today's dominant technologies."
SOON.
The conference will take place on 17–18 September at Queen Mary University of London, in the BLOC Cinema. The venue aims to be one of the most accessible spaces on campus. If you have any accessibility requirements, please have a look at the venue information here.
If you will be joining us from outside the UK, please make sure you have everything you need for your journey. Most international visitors will require an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), which currently costs £20 and can be obtained online using a valid passport. The process is usually straightforward and relatively quick, but we would encourage you to apply as soon as possible, as you will need an approved ETA before boarding a plane, train, or other transport to the UK. Please note that some travellers may still need to obtain a visa instead of, or in addition to, an ETA, depending on their nationality and individual circumstances. If this applies to you, we strongly encourage you to begin the application process as soon as possible, as visa processing times can vary. If you already have an ETA, please take a moment to check that it will still be valid at the time of your travel. If you have previously been refused entry to the UK, you may need to apply for a Standard Visitor Visa instead.
We are sharing a list of hotels associated with Queen Mary University of London, although please feel free to arrange your own accommodation according to the requirements of your institution or funding body. The venue is conveniently located near Mile End station (District, Hammersmith & City, and Central lines) and Stepney Green station (District and Hammersmith & City lines), with several bus routes nearby. This makes it easy to reach from many parts of London.
London's public transport system is generally very reliable, although occasional disruptions do happen. The easiest way to check live service updates is through the TfL Go app or the TfL website, which tend to reflect disruptions more quickly than Google Maps or Apple Maps. For travel on public transport, you can simply use a contactless bank card or an Oyster card. If using contactless payment, remember to use the same card or device throughout your journey. For example, if you touch in with your phone, make sure you also touch out with the same phone. Using a different device or card can result in being charged a higher fare. Many contactless cards issued outside the UK can also be used on London's transport network, although your bank may apply overseas transaction fees. If you would prefer an Oyster card, these can be purchased for a one-off fee of £10.50.
Participants travelling from continental Europe may arrive by coach, train, or plane, while those travelling from the United States and other long-haul destinations will most likely arrive by air. Once in the UK, there are frequent rail and coach connections to London from airports and cities across the country. London's major railway stations are all well connected by the Underground network, making it relatively straightforward to reach your accommodation and the conference venue.
If you are travelling by Eurostar, please allow plenty of time at the station, as passport control and security checks can take longer than expected. Eurostar generally recommends arriving 75–90 minutes before departure, although it is always worth checking the latest guidance from your carrier.
For those arriving by air, London is served by several airports, all of which are connected to the city by public transport. Depending on where you are staying, one option may be more convenient than another. In many cases, booking airport train tickets in advance can reduce costs, while coaches are often the cheapest option. If travelling by coach, it is worth allowing extra time, particularly during busy periods, as traffic can be unpredictable.
Heathrow Airport (LHR): Heathrow is well connected to London by public transport. The Piccadilly Line is usually the cheapest rail option, while the Elizabeth Line offers faster journeys and fares starting from approximately £13.90 depending on your destination. Heathrow Express provides the fastest connection to London Paddington but is generally the most expensive. The best option will depend on the location of your accommodation. Coaches and buses also operate frequent services to central London and other UK destinations.
London Stansted Airport (STN): Stansted Airport is connected to central London by the Stansted Express, which runs to Liverpool Street Station in approximately 45–50 minutes. Booking tickets in advance can often reduce the cost. National Express and other coach companies also provide regular services to London.
London Gatwick Airport (LGW): Gatwick Airport can be reached via the Gatwick Express, which provides a direct service to London Victoria. Southern and Thameslink trains are often cheaper alternatives and may be more convenient depending on where you are staying in London. Coach services are also available.
London City Airport (LCY): London City Airport has a direct connection to the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), providing quick access to Bank, Canary Wharf, Stratford, and the wider London transport network. Contactless cards and Oyster cards are accepted, making travel straightforward. Several local bus routes also serve the airport. Due to its central location, London City Airport is often the easiest airport for reaching central and east London.
London Luton Airport (LTN): Luton Airport is connected to London by train via Luton Airport Parkway station, which is linked to the terminal by the Luton DART shuttle. Trains operated by Luton Airport Express and Thameslink reach central London in around 30–45 minutes. Coach services, including National Express and Green Line, are often the cheapest way to travel between Luton and London. When purchasing train tickets, it is worth checking whether the DART shuttle is included in the fare.
September in London is often pleasant, but the weather can be unpredictable. Daytime temperatures are usually between 15–22°C, though rain is never entirely out of the question. Bringing a light waterproof jacket or a small umbrella is always a good idea.
The UK uses Type G electrical sockets, so if you are travelling from outside the UK and Ireland, please remember to bring an appropriate adapter for your devices. The UK uses 230V, while the U.S. uses 120V, so many U.S. appliances may not work safely in the UK. This is especially true for heat-producing devices like hair dryers, curling irons, straighteners, or electric toothbrush chargers. Please check whether your device says “100–240V” before plugging it in; otherwise, bring a proper voltage converter or use a UK-compatible device.
Almost everywhere in London accepts card payments, including public transport, cafés, pubs, and small shops. Many Londoners rarely carry cash, so there is generally no need to exchange large amounts of money before travelling.
Internet access: Free Wi-Fi is available throughout the university via eduroam for those whose institutions participate in the network. Visitors without eduroam access can use the university's QM-Visitor Wi-Fi network.
For questions about the conference, registration, access, or the programme, please contact:
Dr Jiří Anger j.anger@qmul.ac.uk
For questions about the website and travels, please contact:
Veronika Hanáková veronika.hanakovaxp@gmail.com
