Bogna Konior

Bogna Konior is a later figure in this archive whose work connects artificial intelligence, cyberfeminism, hostile-network theory, nonhuman aesthetics, and ecological media. The six works used here date from 2016 to 2023. They cite and rework Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and Ccru-adjacent concepts, but they do not place Konior in the historical Ccru. Her relation is one of later criticism, reception, and independent development.

Alien aesthetics and xenofeminism

“Alien Aesthetics: Xenofeminism and Nonhuman Animals,” presented at ISEA2016, begins from xenofeminism's commitment to alienation, artifice, technology, and scalable transformation. Konior's criticism is that its opposition between nature and technology risks preserving the naturalist partition it seeks to destroy. If technological nonhumans can join a xeno-politics while animals remain consigned to “nature,” species becomes an unexamined limit on universality (“Alien Aesthetics: Xenofeminism and Nonhuman Animals”, PDF pp. 1–3).

Her proposed alien aesthetics crosses that limit. Nonhuman animals are already technologically conditioned through breeding, confinement, medicine, media, and industrial environments; there is no pristine animal beneath those layers any more than there is an original human beneath avatars and code. A xeno-aesthetics should therefore mobilize research, design, art, and environmental architecture toward cross-species subjects rather than reserve futurity for humans and machines (“Alien Aesthetics: Xenofeminism and Nonhuman Animals”, PDF pp. 3–5). The paper discusses Land, Plant, and Ccru as a genealogy of accelerationism and cyberfeminism. Citation here is not participation.

Aspirational entropy and post-Soviet cyberfeminism

The 2019 essay “Aspirational Entropy: On Post-Soviet Cyberfeminism and the Geo-political Freeze Frame,” published in issue 1 of _AH, tests cyberfeminist inheritance against the 2001 Polish presidential avatar Wiktoria Cukt. Wiktoria's “program” was simultaneously political platform and software: an online database aggregated users' demands into a female-presenting cybernetic candidate. Konior refuses the shortcut by which a feminine image automatically becomes feminist. The avatar can mark women's exclusion from political space, reproduce the gendered automation of service, or become camouflage within an economy of compulsory representation (“Aspirational Entropy”, PDF pp. 2–4).

“Post-Soviet” is consequently a process rather than a stable identity adjective. Konior describes its post as aspirational entropy: an unfinished dissolution in which bodies and images appear to fall indefinitely through uneven geopolitical time. The point is not to announce a nationally authentic Polish cyberfeminism, but to show that cyberspace is historically layered and that apparently simultaneous networks contain different temporalities, absences, and representational traps (“Aspirational Entropy”, PDF pp. 5–6). This reframes Plant's prophetic feminization as one inheritance among others, not a universal template.

Ancestral cyberspace and the technics of secrecy

“Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of Secrecy” was commissioned for Yvette Granata's 2018 exhibition #d8e0ea: post-cyberfeminist datum at Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo. The essay links Cixin Liu's dark-forest cosmology to women's clandestine technical histories. Cyberfeminism becomes an “occult form of warfare” in which intelligence depends on controlling coordinates: concealment, disclosure, and renewed concealment rather than compulsory transparency (“Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of Secrecy”, p. 2).

Caterina Sforza's early-modern books of secrets provide the ancestral case. Recipes, poisons, alchemical procedures, and invisible inks circulated as tested instructions through letters, manuscripts, and speech. Konior treats this erased network as pragmatic technology, then translates its method into algorithmic conditions: data can function as camouflage, while a book of secrets mutates into machine vision and calculated obfuscation (“Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of Secrecy”, p. 2). “Ancestral” does not mean a pure origin; it names a genealogy recovered through excavation, encryption, and reuse.

The dark forest internet

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, first published by Flugschriften in 2020 after being commissioned for Andrej Škufca's Black Market: Zero Hedge exhibition at MGLC Ljubljana, expands that short argument into a theory of networked exposure. Drawing on Liu's solution to the Fermi paradox, Konior treats communication as necessary for social survival and simultaneously as a source of risk. To signal is to reveal coordinates to unknown observers; silence, camouflage, and pre-emption emerge from a “chain of suspicion” without requiring every participant to be consciously hostile (The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, pp. 4–11).

Applied to Web 2.0, the theory describes a system rather than an ethical prescription. Platforms demand legible selves, continuous disclosure, and ever more detailed accounts of intention. That legibility makes users governable and targetable, while the effort to prove benevolence generates further complexity and conflict. Konior's forest therefore oscillates between paranoia and narcissism: users patrol as both hunter and prey, while an automated extraction process measures and redistributes the disorder they produce (The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, pp. 14–20). The model is adjacent to Ccru's hostile systems and Outside, but it is Konior's later synthesis of Liu, entropy, interfaces, and social media.

Gnostic AI

“The Gnostic Machine: Artificial Intelligence in Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae” appeared in the 2023 Oxford volume Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines. Konior reads Lem's Solaris ocean as an archetype of inhuman intelligence: creative, indifferent, and resistant to communication. Summa Technologiae reframes theological problems as questions about biological and technical evolution, artificial worlds, machine knowledge, and the engineering of life (“The Gnostic Machine”, pp. 89–90).

Konior refuses to turn Central or Eastern Europe into an ethical corrective to a monolithic “Western AI.” Lem matters instead as a technology theorist who asks how mediation revises humanist axioms. His “gnostic machine” produces knowledge at the limit of human comprehension and acts on the evolutionary trajectory of the species. Its background joins Polish Catholic theology, Soviet-era cybernetic debate, scientific commitment, and the conviction that cosmic incommunicability leaves humans with structurally partial knowledge (“The Gnostic Machine”, pp. 90–91). The local archive file is a proof excerpt covering pp. 89–91, so this page does not attribute claims from the remainder of the chapter.

Smart oceans and interspecies engineering

“Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering,” published in Alice dos Reis's 2019 Under Current reader, begins with Octopolis and Octlantis: sites where octopuses assemble dens and social relations among shells, bottles, cameras, fishing gear, and other human debris. The encounter destabilizes the direction of alienness. Humans and their objects are extra-aquatic arrivals, while octopuses respond as ecosystem engineers under changing industrial and climatic conditions (“Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering”, pp. 41–44).

For Konior, oceans are already computational media. Submarine cables carry digital traffic, cameras extend perception underwater, environments operate as sensing aggregates, and octopus bodies combine distributed cognition with responsive skin. “Natural” behavior cannot be cleanly separated from technical history when animals build with human waste and humans model machines on animal capacities. The essay ends by proposing deliberate interspecies engineering rather than preserving animals as timeless others (“Smart Oceans, Alien Times: Octopi Engineering”, pp. 44–47).

Archive variants

Three additional files in Konior's archive wing are not separate works: Estetica Aliena is an Italian translation of “Alien Aesthetics,” Entropía aspiracional is the Spanish version of “Aspirational Entropy,” and Temni Gozd: Teorija Interneta incorporates the dark-forest text in the Slovenian Black Market context. They are useful witnesses to circulation and translation, but this page does not count them as three new arguments.