Arts

Digital capitalism has generated new forms of extractivism that extend beyond natural resources to encompass data, attention, affect, and planetary materials. This article examines how exhibition practices can function as forms of algorithmic resistance by foregrounding material praxis, embodied engagement, and curatorial strategies of care. Drawing on a practice-based research approach, the paper develops a theoretical framework around extractivism, materiality, and relational ethics, and applies it to two case studies: the author’s exhibition Nature Reclaims: Images of Healing, which cultivates regenerative imaginaries through urban rewilding photography, tactile installations, and trauma-informed reflective tools; and Fossil Fables, curated by the Global Extraction Observatory (GEO), which exposes the infrastructural, political, and ideological architectures sustaining extractive industries and digital technologies. Through comparative analysis, the article introduces the concept of symbiotic curation to describe a post-extractive curatorial method that holds critical exposure and regenerative proposition in sustained tension. The findings illustrate how exhibitions can reorganize perception, recalibrate temporality, and render hidden infrastructures visible, while also cultivating embodied relations of care, ecological attunement, and collective reflection. By positioning curatorial practice as an epistemic process in which theoretical propositions are tested through spatial, material, and affective decisions, the article identifies transferable principles for post-extractive cultural work. It argues that exhibitions can operate as laboratories for algorithmic resistance and as sites for rehearsing alternative relations between humans, technologies, and more-than-human worlds.

This article sets out an assertion that a mass art project can make a virtue of ‘network extension’ through an Instagram account, to build creative community, new connections, and physical artwork outcomes. We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher is an example of a ‘manifested artwork’, where Fisher’s ideas on capitalism and community are explored through electronic media. We have taken the work of critical theorist, Mark Fisher, and subjected it to a process of détournement, alluding to the work of Guy de Bord and The Situationists. The thing in itself—Fisher’s processed ideas—are reprocessed and held up against the posthumous period between 2017 and now, since he died. The assertion in the work is that while the tools are circumscribed by a set of ‘standards’ and ‘production processes’, this does not delimit them from being employed towards the evolution of embodied and shared actions that develop a counter-narrative or something that eschews the methods of Hollywood or broadcast television documentaries. We just have to learn ways to do this. ‘Decapitalising’ a process, working with human agency and good will, turns the platform of Instagram into a tool of empowerment—reappropriating the algorithm and capturing the collective back from the closed corporate system of control. We see that a form of value is pulled back out of the machinic effects of a proprietary platform.

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an unprecedented surge in scientific and technological experiments directed at the physical transformation of the human body. In Bolshevik Russia of the 1920s, science fiction and scientific and technological experiments created a nexus. The science fiction of Aleksandr Beliaev (1884–1942) turned experiments into adventure plots. Beliaev’s views on scientific experiments were informed not only by Bolshevik science but also by late-nineteenth-century pre-Revolutionary scientific theories. Nikolai Fedorov’s visionary futurity known as “Philosophy of the Common Task” bridged pre-Revolutionary utopian aspirations with the speculative thought of the 1920s across science, literature and art. My aim is to identify and analyse both intersections and differences in Beliaev’s and Fedorov’s visions of futurity in relation to body transformations in two of Beliaev’s most important yet understudied novels of the 1920s, The Amphibian Man and Professor Dowell’s Head. My approach is both synchronic and diachronic. I address features of transhumanist and posthumanist thought in Beliaev’s narratives that involve experiments in assembling hybridised human–animal, interhuman and human–machine organisms. I position Beliaev’s writing within the speculative discourse that was informed by Fedorovian aspirational futurity as well as by scientific and medical experiments involving reanimation and restoration of humans and animals.