FUTURE MANIFESTOS – Konferanse
DIGS, Krambugata 2 / 10. & 11. APRIL, 10:00 – 14:30
Gratis inngang.
Kurator: Zane Cerpina
Collapse: A Story, an Affect and a Manifesto of Sorts
Collapse has become one of the dominant terms through which crises are being articulated and made sense of today. We encounter it in relation to climate systems, political institutions, economic infrastructures, social cohesion, moral norms, AI models, and, increasingly, epistemic authority itself. In this talk, I position ‘collapse’ as a narrative and affective framework through which global uncertainty and personal anxiety are currently being mediated and felt. Rather than ask whether collapse is really happening or how far advanced it might be, my talk offers a second-order reflection on collapse as a concept, an affect, and a cultural technique. The talk traces the shift from apocalyptic imaginaries concerned with revelation and messianic redemption to contemporary collapse narratives that present themselves as rational and science-based. Yet these narratives reproduce a different form of authority and control, one that disavows panic while cultivating resignation, exhaustion – and a masculinist performance of realism. A key case study in the talk is provided by the Reddit forum /collapse, where a vernacular theory of systemic breakdown is currently unfolding.
The talk culminates in the screening of my new short film, /collapse, which functions as both an artwork and a methodological intervention. Composed of archival news footage, AI-generated memory fragments, and a soundtrack derived entirely from Reddit /collapse posts, the film explores how collapse is mediated across human and nonhuman systems. AI plays a crucial role here, not only as a theme but also as a material condition of the work, foregrounding questions of model collapse, synthetic recursion, and the affective automation of our futures. In the context of Meta.Morf 2026: Future Manifestos, my project on collapse also functions as a manifesto, one that entails a refusal of predictive foreclosure. Going beyond the everyday associations of collapse with things falling apart, it revisits the term’s etymology and hidden potential to position it as a loosening of narrative, affective, and epistemic structures. It is through engaging with collapse as both story and affect that new ways of sensing, imagining, and constructing might emerge, I will suggest.
Joanna Zylinska [PL/UK]
Joanna Zylinska is a writer, artist, curator, and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London, where she directs the Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception. An advocate of ‘radical open-access’, she is a co-Director of Open Humanities Press and an editor of its MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series. Zylinska is an author of a number of books – including The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press, 2023), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020), and The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Her own art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching new image ecologies, while trying to map out scenarios for alternative futures.
