Bogna Konior

Bogna Konior is a scholar and a writer whose work focuses on emerging technologies. She is currently Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she works at the Artificial Intelligence & Culture Research Center, and the Interactive Media Arts department. She is the author of Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025). With Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan, she is the co-editor of Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025). In 2025, she was selected for the UN panel on AI and Culture. In 2024, she was a mentor in the Synthetic Minds Lab at the Medialab Matadero and an affiliate researcher at the Antikythera think tank for speculative computation. Her work on philosophy, history, and future of digital culture and technology has been presented internationally, including at the University of Cambridge Global AI Narratives Workshops, the Goethe Institute, e-flux, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She frequently collaborates with art institutions, including Ljubljana Biennale, Fundação de Serralves, Singapore Art Museum, ZKM Center for Art and Media @ Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Amsterdam Research Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and Maribor Computer Arts Festival. 

→ www.bognamk.com

Publication Contribution
Wet Cyberia from the Balkans to the Baltics

The film continues my long-term interest in the shape of emotion and the social tension along the outer edges of Europe today. It confronts jagged and contradictory ideological shifts – scarred, dissonant humour that seeps into relations between bodies, technology and ideology in post-Socialist contexts. Across my oeuvre, technology is a social actor that choreographs attention, produces affect and shapes individual and collective perception.

Equally important is the leagacy of theatre, cabaret and performance arts (especially in Socialist Yugoslavia), which shaped popular and experimental understandings of the body, satire and collective spectatorship. From political cabaret happenings and worker-theatre traditions to avant-garde collectives and festivals, performance functioned as a space where ideology could be exaggerated, destabilised and playfully subverted. This heritage feeds directly into HEAT’s tonal register, where humour, trauma, absurdity and hope coexist with playful unease.

It isn’t the first time I have been preoccupied by spa culture and by the perception of time and embodiment within cultural imaginaries shaped by both technology and political transition. In 2020, just before the pandemic, I was commissioned by Transmediale to develop a prototype for a time-sharing application examining fountains, (online) public space and leisure – along with creating a corresponding sculpture in the shape of a large clepsydra. Installed at HKW in Berlin and later reinterpreted for the 34th Biennale of Graphic Arts (Iskra Delta) in Ljubljana in 2021, the sculpture also worked as a space where people could gather, relax and interact with each other during the exhibition/festival.

This film introduces a narrative framing to my practice and research on public spaces organised around water and leisure. HEAT builds upon the mid-century ‘spa novel’ genre and my earlier works, such as the installation Forum that examines water and leisure as social engineering projects. It is a feminist reinterpretation of the spa novel, taking inspiration from Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and Olga Tokarczuk’s Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story. Both are brilliant books and excellent reads when one is feeling doomed by the lingering feeling around us. Tokarczuk’s novel is a surreal riff on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the resort novel’s ultimate patriarch, while Ugrešić’s three-part book uses the figure of Baba Yaga as a lens to explore aging through a personal story about her mother and through three women from former Yugoslavia on an adventure at a Czech spa resort.

HEAT is informed by a sustained engagement with alternative technological imaginaries that emerged in Socialist and non-aligned contexts, particularly in Yugoslavia. Rather than positioning Eastern Europe as the suburb of Europe in a perpetual state of ‘catching up,’ I am interested in parallel, often overlooked infrastructures and speculative futures that were actively being developed through the often messy definition of borders between countries and continents. (Where does Europe end?)

One important reference to alternative technological imaginaries here is Iskra Delta: a Yugoslav computer company that in the 1980s attempted to build a sovereign digital ecosystem, producing hardware, software and networked systems that circulated across Yugoslavia, the Non-Aligned Movement and parts of the Global South (another is the state-owned Bulgarian company IZOT, which was a sort of a Silicon Valley of the Eastern Bloc).1 Iskra Delta represents a moment when technological development was explicitly entangled with ideas of self-management, decentralisation and political autonomy. Its collapse in the late Socialist period mirrors a broader transition from collective technological imaginaries toward privatised, extractive and opaque systems that dominate today. HEAT returns to this moment in a sense, asking how alternative technological trajectories might still haunt our present, for better or worse, but definitely inspiring ways to reclaim our stories and the technology capturing and mediating them from their current masters.

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1 Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernizartion and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023).   

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