Esoteric Ecotechnics: Irrational Computation and Conspiratorial Networking tackles its topics on several layers, from material and technical research in the fields of computing and network architecture, to rituals and practices engaging with symbols and cosmologies, to the development strategies of refusal and conspiratorial subversion. The festival looks for spaces of non-compliance and resistance to the current climates through artistic positions that operate on a small scale, utilising and creating obscure and conspiratorial symbols, aesthetics and rituals to construct, as networks of peers, new ground for socio-political imagination.
Where some artists dig into toxic pasts and speculative ruins, others engineer living systems in the present. Staš Vrenko’s Thresholds Breached introduces solar-powered electromagnetic organisms that pulse, respond, and adapt within their environment, exploring how patterns of communicative behaviours can emerge in computing networks situated in physical space. Their delicate light-and-energy loops suggest the possibility of altruism in closed ecosystems, while simultaneously appearing alien and inefficient when compared to the productivity demands of cultural and digital economies.
The work of Ioana Vreme Moser is also grounded on material aspects of computing technologies involving minerals, politics, cosmetics and electronics, as well as a network of affinity, early information technologies and wider geopolitical narratives. Arsenic Ballerinas consists of a series of music instruments made by custom electronics and mineral-based lipsticks. By transmitting solidarity messages from networks of early female radio operators, the work connects the histories of computing to those of war, but also resistance.
Other works extend this excavation of symbols across time and cosmology. Ginevra Petrozzi reminds us of the never-halting temporalities of media technologies, while exposing the role of rituals and beliefs as narrative dispositifs. Her work It’s The End Of The World As We Know It situates us in a ruin within ruins, where fragments from the Etruscans’ protective symbols and our present-day world iconography are recomposed as a future relic for worlds yet to come. Over time, the icons shown on plasma TV screens will burn themselves into their recent, yet already obsolete, displaying devices, referring to the progressive succession of epochs and their cosmologies.
Federico Poni follows similar currents of occult interpretation in Four Microsystems Understood Through Belladonna Incense, where tarot cards, burning leaves, and digital imagination converge into unstable cosmologies – half ritual, half hallucination.
In the festival, history itself emerges as a non-linear process, full of bifurcations, forgotten possibilities and conspiratorial paths. In this vein, PROGRAMMA 101 by REINCANTAMENTO uncovers fragments buried at the origin of the digital present through the unique experience of Olivetti, the visionary Italian technological company of the 20th century. Infused with the aesthetics and logic of conspiracy, the installation invites visitors to navigate Cold War shadows, the hidden influence of the US Empire, and the fragile mosaic of evidence that underpins Western technological culture today – a conspiratorial environment where truth appears not as a stable construct but as scattered, uncoherent facts.
Contemporary rituals can be vital modes of critical thought and resistance against techno-capitalist hegemony. With Sigil Séance Against Space Billionaires, Lucile Olympe Haute and Institute of Diagram Studies (David Benqué) transform chaos magick into a collaborative weapon against techno-capitalist colonisation, generating protective sigils to symbolically “leave the billionaires in space.” Similarly, Pedro del Real Lavergne’s performative sermon Ludd Lives! adopts the format of a PowerPoint gospel to parody techno-optimist messianism, transforming corporate dogma into mystical revelation. In a different register, Federico Poni and Chiara Prodi’s performance Algorismo fuses smartphones, bodies, and ancestral gestures into a networked rite of irrational numbers and anarchist trigonometry, celebrating the chaos of languages and the sacred violence of ritual mathematics.
Technologie und das Unheimliche present SIRIUS.EXE 2.0, functioning as both digital archive and ritual environment. By juxtaposing cultic rhetoric of cosmic departure with computational infrastructures, the work reveals how narratives of salvation, exodus, and “graduation” from Earth persist in techno-cultural imaginaries. It foregrounds the paradox of technology as both a promise of liberation and an apparatus of control, showing how executable belief systems mirror the logic of software.
In the current epoch, mythified algorithms manage the complex dynamics of surveillance and desires at the root of contemporary social networks, whose feeds activate superstitions, beliefs and rituals that intersect forms of exploitative labour and social manipulation. S()fia Braga’s Platform Workshippers confronts the invisible labour on social media, where users oscillate between devotion and exploitation, worship and work. Her cosmology of digital user archetypes merges platform diagrams with the Tree of Life, and reframes the acts of posting, scrolling, and monetising as ritual gestures of algorithmic sacrifice.
A conspiratorial network is also woven through the city by fellow conspirators, who appear at various locations. Between visions of the future and the mystical otherworld, Kres (bonfire) in Salon+ awakens and brings the hidden visions of Slovenia's emerging digital art around the hearth. Tactical Tech interventions in the House of Architecture Maribor confront conventional narratives of AI and provoke critical thinking about technology’s pervasiveness. Through their Fog Manifesto, the Austrian collective Stadtwerkstatt put in place artistic-theoretical research areas on dissolution, invisibility, diffuseness and new aggregate states. In Root, the exhibition of awarded student works at Kulturni Inkubator, entangles four projects where digital technology is used as a substrate for new phenomena that transcend and restructure their normative origins.
Together, these works build the future of computation, which may not lie in optimisation or clarity, but in the irrational, esoteric and symbolic. They stage technologies as ruins, as organisms, as spells - reframing networks as sites of devotion, resistance, and regeneration. Artists insist on the carving space for new alliances between peers, mystical traditions, conspiratorial imaginaries and new digital structures. Through the deliberate creation and adoption of deceptive and conspiratorial practices and aesthetics, the festival programme explores new ground for socio-political imagination, envisioning new social alliances and resilient community networks.