Conference Tue, June 3, 17.30-21 and Wed, June 4, 12-19 at AdBK Munich, Akademiestraße 2, Central Lecture Hall, free admission With: Gregory Chatonsky, Simon Denny, Navine G. Dossos, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Mat Dryhurst, Constant Dullaart, Antonio Somaini There is a strange disconnect in tech’s recent effects on politics and culture.

“The claws were bad enough in the first place – nasty, crawling little death-robots. But when they began to imitate their creators, it was time for the human race to make peace – if it could! […] Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight…

AI has played a pivotal role in Israel’s war in the Gaza strip since October 7 ^th 2023, when Hamas militants massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and took more than 250 hostage (CNN 2025).  Reporting by Israeli and international news outlets have detailed how large language models and predictive analytics are helping to determine when and where bombs fall from the sky and troops shoot on the ground (Abraham 2024).

Overture Over the last few years, I have been researching the militarized Kurdish landscape through a triangle of affinities linking the machine, the animal and the human. The interaction between the militaristic, the natural and the cultural unfolds as a sonic battle on the colonized landscape. Sonic booms, bird calls and songs of resistance echo in the same valleys.

To say that ours are darkening times is to acknowledge, that the present moment – the year is 2025 – is increasingly characterised by familiar modes of authoritarian oppression, of right-wing political cruelty and of inevitably rising geopolitical tensions in the context of which nuclear Armageddon and the necessity for autonomous weapon systems are frequently conjured up,  often in the same breath.

As my title suggests, the focus of this essay is not drones per se, but rather the wider turn to algorithmic warfare that they enable and of which they remain a key part, from surveillance operations to targeted assassination.

Somewhere in Germany there is a securitized data server that holds one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of propaganda videos produced by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), an extremist jihadist militant group that gained international notoriety in the mid-2010s for its sensationalist use of media violence to spread its ideology.

Introduction Human Computers is a media archaeology research that aims to unravel the intricate entanglement between computing and capitalism through the prism of labor.

“Noise in the sense of a large number of small events is often a causal factor much more powerful than a small number of large events can be. Noise makes trading in financial markets possible, and thus allows us to observe prices for financial assets… We are forced to act…

Neither natural nor intelligent ‘Artificial intelligence’ (AI) is such a large, dynamic, and vaguely defined field that much of what can be said about it is both true and false, or no longer true or possibly not yet true.