This essay examines the layered structure of digital images in the context of the war in Ukraine, with a focus on how foregrounds and backgrounds are visually and conceptually manipulated to shape perception. It explores how digital media technologies enable the censorship, fabrication, and weaponization of images, blurring the line between reality and fiction. Drawing on historical visual strategies from Soviet Russia and contemporary practices in Russian state media, the essay traces how power operates through what is shown, hidden, or erased. It highlights the role of computer graphics and social media in the hyper-aestheticization of conflict.

In physics, distance is measured as the product of speed and time; in mathematics, it is defined as the total path travelled by an object from one point to another. Both definitions share an operational clarity but capture only a single dimension of the relationship between objects. The lived reality of distance—and its counterpart, proximity—resists such simplifications. One recurring question in the contributions of this journal issue is how space itself is produced, shaped, and manipulated in contemporary techno-culture. Proximity today is engineered through techniques of approximation—statistical modes of patterning identities, collectivities, and affective bonds to corporate infrastructures. Critical vocabularies have long privileged distance—critical distance, aesthetic distance—but we are already immersed in these approximations as we are addressed, enrolled, and captured through platforms and other interfaces of affective persuasion. The challenge, then, is to ask: how might critical digital culture research manoeuvre in this terrain?

The idea that algorithms are infinitely improving our lives is presented as an undeniable truth, but for trans people, algorithms have violent, far-reaching implications. Behind the veil of neoliberal techno-optimism, algorithms perpetuate colonial and cisnormative legacies that anchor a binary idea of life, wherein the possible ‘human’ becomes the white, cisgender human, which in return violates and denounces trans people from not fitting the binary codes embedded into and making up algorithmic systems. Instead of complying with neoliberal beliefs in algorithms or falling short on critique, this article theorises the aesthetics of trans lives as embodied liminal data lives as a strategy of sensing distance to algorithms from the tactical uncodeability of transness in opposition to the binary confinements of algorithmic technologies. Taking this stance, this article asks: How can we create spaces of distance to algorithms in a world inherently entangled with them, and how can the liminality of trans data lives allow us to consider (im)possible ways of living and distancing as forms of resistance to the reality of algorithmic violence in which we exist?

This text presents a series of theoretical examinations of concepts such as induction, noise and space as they pertain to a broader ongoing artistic research project entitled Noise Re(in)duction that explores the possibilities of noise reduction technologies as sonic material for artistic practice. The central argument of the project is that by artificially reducing acoustic noise and digitally cleansing sonic environments, Active Noise Cancelling (ANC) algorithms induce a different kind of noise into our perception of reality. This paper further explores this notion by arguing that the induced noise is manifested as a parallel sonic reality (a sonic distance) which, although sensible, is contingent to the biases embedded in the algorithm. Thus, the broader implications of the conceptualization of noise, distance, sound and reality itself are negotiated through noise reduction technologies and the induction of a sonic distance. These theoretical frameworks therefore seek to establish a solid foundation for an artistic and phenomenological exploration of the nuances found in contemporary audio technologies.

This article proposes "folded distance" as a critical conceptual framework to theorise techno-ontological aesthetics in the context of networked media and digital culture. In contrast to representational approaches, it introduces the notion of technoontology—a mode of analysis that foregrounds the operational, recursive, and affective infrastructures of networked life. Through close examination of VJ Peter Rubin’s live-mixing practices and the immersive architectures of techno-events, such as Berlin’s Mayday and Chromapark, the article elucidates how media systems enact distributed sensation, rhythmic entrainment, and modulated proximity. Folding, in this context, is theorised as both spatial and affective topology through which subjectivity, perception, and relation are reconfigured. The recursive logics of technical media are shown to generate aesthetic conditions where distance is infrastructurally mediated rather than spatially determined. This study contributes to debates in media theory by articulating a techno-aesthetic ontology of sensation—one that interrogates how recursive systems shape the lived realities of digital and post-digital culture.

Whilst research into cultural value and digital technologies is nascent in art museums, neural media technologies like generative AI pose new methodological and theoretical challenges. Looking at the case of the Tate Gallery and the dataset LAION 5B used to train the text-to-image Stable Diffusion model, the article highlights the long running challenges of studying digital media from a museum perspective. Reflecting on previous uses of AI in the museum, they propose experiments in dataset research and analysis by which museums can evidence the use of their images in the training of Stable Diffusion. But these experiments also aim to develop ways in which changes in cultural value can be analysed and theorised when art collection photographs get operationalised in LAION 5B. Sketching the first steps of an epistemological analysis of image aesthetic assessment and aesthetic predictors from the perspective of museum values and aesthetics, I call for a more thorough engagement with the discourses and practices on art developed in computer sciences so that new collective and connected imaginaries of culture and advanced technology may be constructed.

This article explores how choreography can serve as a critical framework for analysing and intervening in the affective economies of digital platforms. Building on André Lepecki’s notion of choreography as a “technique designed to capture actions,” it is examined as a medium that abstracts movement into data, enabling further technical or creative processes. Drawing on theories from dance studies, media theory, and affect theory, this articlefexamines choreography’s capacity to expose, modulate, andfreconfigure proximity and distance. It explores how affect, gaze, and movement are governed, simulated, and potentially subverted within platform cultures. The argument is grounded in case studies ranging from Mette Ingvartsen’s performance 50/50 to Candela Capitán’s SOLAS. These examples illuminate how bodies and affects are choreographed not only on stage but within digital architectures, offering tools to think against the commodification of intimacy.

Xenoimage Dataset is an artistic practice that unleashes the hallucinatory capacities of image-generating AI to question the perpetuation of power dynamics inherent in normative gender dichotomies. Employing techniques called xeno-tuning, it adapts pre-trained models to produce weird representations of corporealities, criticising the homogenous tendencies and biases inherent in image datasets. The purpose is to define the visuality of the xeno as a transformative agent of current hegemonic identities.

This article proposes platform pragmatics as a framework for understanding collective behaviour and forms of labour within platform ecosystems. It contributes to the field of platform criticism by problematising a certain view of users as passive victims of surveillance and algorithmic governmentality. The main argument is developed by thinking through the production of content and forms by users, and their circulation through computational logic and aective contagion. Through some illustrative cases and analyses of cultural habits, the article addresses the political and aesthetic configuration of these forms of production — not only of content/forms, but also of culture and subjectivity. This is explored by thinking through three themes: the subsumption of creativity and opportunism in platform economies; the mobilisation of speculative temporalities not only in computation but also across user practices; and the generalisation of self-reflexivity as a feminised cultural behaviour and aesthetic mode. Finally, I propose to understand platform pragmatics as a mode of subaltern power, that might be alien to traditional political reason, but precisely because of this needs to be grappled with through inventive cultural and social criticism.

This article discusses feminist performance and internet art practices of the 21st century through the lens of Boris Groys’s theory of innovation. It analyses works by Signe Pierce, Molly Soda, and Maya Man, to position practices of self-documentation online in exchange with feminist art histories of performance and electronic media. The text proposes that the discussed contemporary art practices fulfil the process of innovation detailed by Groys through a process of re-valuation of values via an exchange between the everyday, trivial, and heterogenous realm of social media (‘the profane’) and the valorised realm of cultural memory (‘the archive’). Using digital ethnography and contextual analysis, framed by the theory of innovation, the text introduced ‘content value’ as a feature of contemporary art on the Internet. The article demonstrates how feminist internet art practices expand on cultural value through the realisation of a process of innovation via an intra-cultural exchange between the feed and the institution.