by Adela Lovric // Dec. 15, 2025
The second edition of the Minna Tarkka Lectures—an annual gathering dedicated to exploring how art, media and technology might reshape democratic life—took place over four days at Kiasma and Aalto University in Helsinki. Inspired by the legacy of Finnish media art pioneer Minna Tarkka (1960-2023), who founded art and media cultural agency M-Cult in 2000, the program of lectures and workshops was presented by M-Cult, under the artistic direction of Jussi Koitela, as a way to carry on Tarkka’s commitment to socially-engaged practices and critical inquiry at the intersection of politics and technology.
Titled ‘Collective Imagination in the Era of Optimization,’ this year’s edition asked: How can artists, communities and technologies rewire shared futures when the dominant narratives emphasize acceleration and optimization? And what forms of togetherness and resistance surface through media within the context of artistic practices today? The core program—keynote lectures by Ruth Catlow, Harold Hejazi and Dzina Zhuk (of the artist collective eeefff)—highlighted emerging forms of rebellious, joyful, multispecies collectivity and solidarity in a time of rising fascism and technocracy.
Ruth Catlow: ‘Life and Death in the World Wild Web,’ Minna Tarkka Lectures 2025, Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki // Photo by Haliz Yosef, Courtesy of M-Cult
Catlow traced her journey as a co-founder of Furtherfield, a UK-based organization working with art and technology for eco-social change. Beginning with the do-it-with-others or DIWO approach (introduced by co-founder Marc Garrett in 2007 as a progression from the DIY punk spirit), digital commons and open source principles, she reflected on projects ranging from early web experiments in the 1990s to recent works responding to today’s “Earth-sized” ecological crises, asking how young people might gain “tales and tools of mutualist thriving to make adventurous lives that respond to the contemporary context.” Catlow emphasized co-creation and ownership of shared narratives as a way for communities to reclaim rapidly shifting technosocial contexts in a world where computation concentrates wealth among billionaires—especially when these shared narratives mobilize action. Highlighting Furtherfield’s ongoing project ‘The Treaty of Finsbury Park’ (2020–25), she advocated for creative work in solidarity with all beings. In this case, a Live Action Role-Play (LARP) invites human and more-than-human participants into a fictional world pursuing goals that support the park’s biodiversity in practical, real-world ways.
Harold Hejazi: ‘Reprogramming Public Spaces,’ Minna Tarkka Lectures 2025, Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki // Photo by Haliz Yosef, Courtesy of M-Cult
With ‘Reprogramming Public Spaces,’ Harold Hejazi presented a playable lecture that foregrounded laughter as a force that can “cut through fear, anger and division, revealing shared understanding and truth” and that “helps us enter worlds and new realities together.” Using humor to approach difficult subject matter, his video game performances transform the theater into a participatory civic space, where the audience becomes a multiplayer collective and game levels mirror real-world systems. By embodying these systems, participants collectively explore shared struggles or momentarily inhabit experiences unfamiliar to them. Hejazi’s work asks how we practice community, emphasizing that what matters most is creating a space for people to interact and rehearse humanity together, regardless of the technology that enables it. The lecture became a case in point, bending conventions of the one-way format by inviting the audience to play along. From simulating quests for arts funding and a Finnish residency permit, to navigating a conversation on belonging and othering with a character represented as a Finnish Person of Color, these humor-laced games functioned as social glue, opening up a shared speculative space for untangling complexities of living alongside each other.
eeefff: ‘Scenes of Algosomatics, Educational Fiction, Partisan Technologies,’ Minna Tarkka Lectures 2025, Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki // Photo by Haliz Yosef, Courtesy of M-Cult
eeefff’s lecture ‘Scenes of Algosomatics, Educational Fiction, Partisan Technologies’ unfolded as a techno-political-poetic inquiry into how algorithms inhabit bodies, and how bodies might in turn intervene in algorithmic systems. Central to the talk was “algosomatics,” a concept that refuses the split between computation and corporeality, foregrounding how contemporary technologies both support and exploit bodily life, affects and automatisms. Drawing attention to motor learning and somatic memory, eeefff framed bodily expression as generative and pre-linguistic, a site where imagination precedes and exceeds formalized systems. From this embodied perspective emerges the concept of “educational fiction”: not a concern with what we imagine, but how imagination is materially scaffolded. Educational fiction operates through infrastructures and techniques that enable social imagination to take form—fictional in scenario, real in affect. Education here is not disciplinary but situational, producing temporary autonomous zones for collective practice and speculative rehearsal. This approach crystallized in the presentation of eefff’s project where participants reenacted partisan tactics used in Belarus to slow down train delivery of Russian military equipment during the early months of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by short-circuiting railway tracks. Participants confronted infrastructures as sites of embodied agency, training skills not yet useful, but urgently imaginable.
Following the lectures, refreshments came in the form of edible artworks. ‘Shared Flavours, Shared Ideas’ riffed on Tarkka’s insistence on accompanying M-Cult’s events with food that she would prepare herself. The importance Tarkka saw in hospitality and in food as a bonding agent and the basis of community gatherings echoes feminist theorist Sheila Mullett’s view on what care is: a freely chosen practice, not a service that someone performs under economic, social or psychological pressures. Tarkka would famously swap catering for the more intimate and caring DIY approach, even if it warranted some organizational chaos and overwhelm. Honoring her legacy while also learning from her example, Koitela adapted it from a DIY to a DIWO (do-it-with-others) approach, inviting artists whose practice revolves around food to match their edible offerings to the lectures.
Alejandra Alarcón, Minna Tarkka Lectures 2025, Kiasma, Helsinki // Photo by Haliz Yosef, Courtesy of M-Cult
The DIWO ethos dovetailed beautifully with Catlow’s opening lecture, which Alejandra Alarcón paired with earthy and airy flavors arranged across a tablecloth collage featuring photographs gathered on the artist’s walks, alongside textiles dyed with foraged plants. Hejazi’s gamified lecture found the perfect counterpart in Caroline Suinner’s unruly food spread—an assemblage of gooey, creamy and crumbly bits and pieces, laid out for hands-on engagement, whether to eat or to play with. Playfulness initially faltered against the disciplined atmosphere of the grand art institution, mirroring the very social conditioning Hejazi seeks to “reprogram.” Play had to be practiced again, pushed through internalized constraints, rewiring our capacity for free expression and bringing us back to a place of collective imagination. Koira1 and Emma Vilppula continued this soft sabotage of institutional stuffiness with a vegan hot dog stand, serving a creative take on a fast food staple, proving that minor gestures, strategically deployed, can shift the tone of a room.
Caroline Suinner, Minna Tarkka Lectures 2025, Kiasma, Helsinki // Photo by Haliz Yosef, Courtesy of M-Cult
Taken together, the Minna Tarkka Lectures traced a set of shared concerns about the state of civic life under conditions of accelerationism, optimization and algorithmic governance. Catlow, Hejazi and eeefff each approached this from distinct positions yet converged on a refusal of efficiency as a political horizon. Stacked against a mounting arsenal of repressive tactics—ranging from recent legislations enabling an even more pervasive surveillance to violent crackdowns on activist movements, restrictions on labor unions’ rights and deep funding cuts across the cultural sector—the program foregrounded the importance of reclaiming technology and technologically shaped environments for community organizing and for imagination rather than control. It emphasized shared narratives, unlikely multispecies alliances, speculative rehearsal, world-building through play and the hacking of systems through embodied agency, among other strategies. In line with Minna Tarkka’s legacy, the program insisted that technology and media are never neutral, and that cultural narratives shape what worlds can be built, and by whom. Collective imagination emerged not as a speculative luxury, but as a civic necessity that must be practiced, defended and continually renewed.
