Situation 11. Military Brain Rot

With the participation of:

Shona Illingworth

She is a Danish-Scottish artist based in London, UK. Informed by her long-term investigations into the dynamic processes of memory, amnesia and cultural erasure, her work examines the devastating impact of accelerating military, industrial and environmental transformations of airspace and outer space and the implications for human rights. She is co-founder of the Airspace Tribunal with human rights lawyer Nick Grief. 
Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Topologies of Air at Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2025); Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie, Toulouse (2022-23), Bahrain National Museum, Manama (2022) and The Power Plant, Toronto (2022). Illingworth was a recipient of the Stanley Picker Fellowship and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2016).  
She is a Professor of Art, Film and Media at the University of Kent and currently an Imperial War Museum Associate, Artist Fellow for the UKRI Polarities Network and sits on the international editorial boards of Digital War and Memory, Mind and Media.  
Topologies of Air – Shona Illingworth, Downey, A. (ed) was published by Sternberg Press and the Power Plant in 2022.   

Tatiana Bazzichelli
Tatiana Bazzichelli is the founder and director of the Disruption Network Lab, a non-profit organisation in Berlin that explores the intersection of politics, technology and society (https://www.disruptionlab.org/). Her work focuses on whistleblowing, network culture, art and activism. Since September 2023, she is the director of the Disruption Network Institute, a new centre for investigation and empirical research into the impact of artificial intelligence on new technologies of war, automated weapons and networked warfare (https://disruption.institute). She received a Ph.D. in Information and Media Studies from the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, in 2011 and is the author of Whistleblowing for Change (2021), Networked Disruption (2013), Disrupting Business (2013) and Networking (2006). For three years until 2014, she was a curator at the transmediale art & digital culture festival in Berlin, where she developed the year-round programme “reSource transmedial culture Berlin” and curated several events. 

Noura Tafeche
Visual artist, onomaturge, and independent researcher whose practice moves across archival methods, laboratory-based processes, video, installation, neologisms and drawing. 
She graduated in New Media Art from the Brera Academy of fine arts, with a particular focus on net.art, however, her most formative experience has been The Influencers Festival, Barcelona.  
Her research explores visual culture and its techno-political entanglements, with particular attention to digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches, and non-Anglophone meme cultures.  
She also examines the use of synthetic images in institutional neo-propaganda strategies. 
Her research project 'The Politics of Rendering' was awarded the Italian Council 2025-2026 grant by the Italian Ministry of Culture. 
She has exhibited, lectured, and led laboratories at Aksioma (Ljubljana), Medialab Matadero (Madrid), transmediale (Berlin), Disruption Network Lab (Berlin), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur), Impakt (Utrecht), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), C/O Berlin (Berlin), Design Museum (Helsinki), Tainan Art Museum (Tainan), Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong), TheWrong Biennale (internet), Aarhus Kunsthal (Aarhus), Triennale Milano (Milano), Pirelli Hangar Bicocca (Milano), Mattatoio (Roma), Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem), Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), and the European Union Representative Centre (Al Quds, Palestine). 

Flavia Dzodan
She is an Argentinian artist and researcher based in Amsterdam. She is a professor and director of the Algorithmic Cultures research group at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Sandberg Instituut. Her practice spans sound, moving image, computational performance, and publishing, examining how algorithmic systems and colonial infrastructures shape perception, affect, memory, and violence. 
Her recent work centres on The Conductive Desert, a research and performance project exploring desertification, archives, extraction, and infrastructural latency. She has recently presented her work at Sonic Acts, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, and Murmur. In 2026, she published Latent Mournings: Notes on Algorithmic Haunting through her publishing imprint, Transversal Media. 

Lisa Ling
Whistleblower, former Technical Sergeant, US Air Force Drone Surveillance Program, US Lisa Ling began her military career in the early 1990s as a medic and nurse. She became recognised for her information systems skills, and was encouraged to enter the combat communications field, where she participated in the operations, maintenance, and security of networked communications technology. The Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) enterprise required more people to build and operate it, so her Combat Communications Squadron was assimilated into the Drone Program and moved to Beale Air Force Base. During her Military Career she was sent to various locations, including the DCGS headquarters at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia, an Air National Guard site in Kansas, as well as several overseas deployments. Lisa served her last active-duty assignment with the site at Beale Air Force Base in California. After her military service, she travelled to Afghanistan to see first-hand the effects of what she participated in. She has a BA in History from UC Berkeley.  

Erica Friscioni
Erica Friscioni (last name sounds like: frish ee oh nee), core contributor to vcinfodocs.com for three years and longtime Chicago-based activist with past involvement in anti-racist work, labor rights activism, and anti-carceral human rights advocacy. 

Programme coordinated by: 

Joana Moll
She is a Barcelona/Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way techno-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include data materiality, surveillance, interfaces, and the increasing militarization of civil society through digital media. She has presented her work in renowned institutions, museums, universities and festivals around the world such as Venice Biennale, Art Basel, MAXXI, MMOMA, MACBA, Laboral, CCCB, ZKM, Bozar, The Natural History Museum in Berlin, Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Ars Electronica, HeK Basel, Photographer’s Gallery, Korean Cultural Foundation Center, Chronus Art Center, New York University, Georgetown University, Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, Rutgers University, University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Illinois, Concordia University, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ETH Zürich, École d'Art d'Aix en Provence, British Computer Society, The New School, CPDP 2019, Transmediale, FILE and ISEA among many others. 
Her work has been featured extensively on international media including The New York Times, The Financial Times, Der Spiegel, National Geographic, Quartz, Wired, Vice, The New Inquiry, Netzpolitk, El Mundo, O’Globo, La Reppublica, Fast Company, CBC, NBC or MIT Press.  
She is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and has collaborated with organizations including the Mozilla Foundation and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, one of Europe’s leading high-performance computing institutions. She's been a research fellow at BBVA Foundation, a fellow at The Weizenbaum Institute and Disruption Network Institute in Berlin, and an artistic researcher in residence at the Critical Media Lab at HGK in Basel. Currently, she is a professor for Networks in the Art Department at KHM in Cologne, and a visiting lecturer at Escola Elisava in Barcelona. 

This course aims to unravel the interdependencies between internet infrastructures, AdTech, surveillance, bodies and contemporary processes of digital militarisation. Through invited experts from the fields of the military, the arts, activism and academia, we will explore these relationships in depth to interrogate the erosion of meaning and its connection to the gradual loss of human agency in the age of brain rot.

Although the course, given the context from which it is conceived and developed, will focus particularly on analysing the technosocial apparatus and its political, material and cultural ramifications, the sessions are also actively aimed at people whose practices engage with other cultural apparatuses of European modernity, such as theatre, literature, photography or cinema. The group’s collective thinking will benefit from this plurality of perspectives. For this reason, the selection process will pay particular attention to the diversity of the participants’ backgrounds.

Maximum group size: 12 participants, selected through an application process.