texts

co-authored with Mikkl Rorbo

Digital Occultism charts out the history of memetic circulation, situating it within a genealogy of occult logics. It operates as a constitutive force deeply embedded in technoculture and shapes how reality itself is produced. Tracing the emergence of fictions from early internet cultures to contemporary platform environments, it examines how they produce material realities, how politics operate as psychological warfare, and how desires are engineered through algorithmic feedback. In the afterword, Zach Blas takes us in and spits us out through the inverted, heretical vision of CULTUS, into the underside, rendering visible occult epistemologies operative within it.

Aksioma 2026

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Deeply hybrid, what the art of Anan Fries captures is the spillovers between meta- and meatspace. Their latest: a live video essay that, layered from gaming and dance, cuts through Silicon Valley's engineering fetish to reach its most valuable IP - story.

Spike Art Magazine #87: Everything's Computer. 2026.

If the sigil was the magickal technology of the isolated practitioner, the meme is the sigil of the networked age. Co-written with Mikkel Rorbo, this text traces the genealogy of memes and sigillisation.

Memes as Sigils, co-authored with Mikkel Rorbo

Fotomuseum Winterthur/PERMANENT BETA. 2026.

Spirit photography became culturally operative not through belief in ghosts but through the discovery of a repeatable technical threshold where photographic processes diverged from intended outcomes, rendering unpredictability itself a site of investigation and practice. This essay investigates the genealogy from spirit photography to the (unexpected) generation of AI cryptids.

Threshold Cartographies and Accidental Demons, co-written with Mikkel Rorbo

Fotomuseum Winterthur/PERMANENT BETA. 2026.

Swiping Right on God investigates how spirituality mutates in the age of platform capitalism. Through media theory, meme analysis and posthuman philosophy, Sophie Publig traces how angelcore aesthetics and digital mysticism reroute the internet as a sacred infrastructure, giving rise to Network Spirituality. Between post-irony and belief, kawaii semiotics disguise ideology in softness, forming an affective interface between ritualistic devotion and algorithmic governance.

Swiping Right on God

PostScriptUM #54. Aksioma. 2025.

Co-written with Claire Elise Herzberg, this text on the works of Eliska Jahelkova discusses memetic techniques like shrineposting as sites of meditation in the context of visual overload online.

"Where I Shrinepost From": Minor Techniques and Immanent Operations, co-authored with Claire Elise Herzberg

SUM Journal. #25. 2025.

An analysis of appropriations and reappropriations of angelcore aesthetics in Network Spirituality (in German).

Swiping Right on God: Aesthetische Aneignungen als ideologische Strategie in Network Spirituality

Zeitschrift fuer Medienwissenschaften. Vol. 17, #2. p. 81-94. 2025.

A short bestiary on the living entities inhabitating memetic eco-systems written in pig Latin.

Bestiarium Memeticum

xCoAx 2024 Conference Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, edited by Miguel Carvalhais, Mario Verdicchio, Luisa Ribas & Andre Rangel. 2024.

Building on my doctoral dissertation, this essay understands memes from a critical posthumanist persperctive.

Towards a Sympoietic Theory of Memetic Evolution

Chloe Arkenbout, Idil Galip: Critical Meme Reader III. INC Reader 17. Institute for Network Cultures. 2024.

Talking about the power of memes and whether there is undiscovered potential in regard to the climate crises. Group interview by ORF Topos on Kllima Biennale Wien (in German).

Die Macht von Memes

Leonie Markovics. ORF Topos. 2024.

This thesis considers Internet memes from a media-ecological perspective in order live up to the eco-systems of digital cultures where memes emerge, mutate, and thrive. In this framing, memes need to be understood in relation to the users, platforms, media, infrastructure, and references that create and circulate them. This requires a media archaeological examination of the Internet platforms mainly used for the sharing of memes.

The Sympoietic Life of Internet Memes

Doctoral dissertation. Supervised by Clemens Apprich and Peter Weibel. University of Applied Arts Vienna. 2023.

How did we become so obsessed with being the last people on this planet?

Microdosing the Apocalypse

Livia Klein, Kai Philipp Trausenegger. SPECULATIVE SPECULUM. Exhibition catalogue. 2023.

"It's comrade Britney, bitch" is written in pink pseudo-cyrillic letters over a red background. In the center of the image, we see the famous counterfeits that form the classic genealogy of Marxist thinkers: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Britney Spears. Wait, Britney Spears, US-American pop hit machine since the late 1990s?

Comrade Britney and the Critical Potential of Marxist Memeing

Contemporary Matters Journal. #3. 2021.

This Master's thesis aims to point out the crucial role contemporary artistic practices play in mediating and combatting ecological crises and refers to After ALife Ahead by Pierre Huyghe from 2017 as a case study. The work can be interpreted as a post-apocalyptic scenario challenging the anthropocentric worldview through the deconstruction of binary oppositions such as nature and culture, human and non-human, and life and non-life. Deconstructing these binary oppositions also means to re-think the role of contemporary art in the entanglement thereof.

Post-Apocalypse Now! Recursive Entanglements of Ecology and the Capitalocene in Pierre Huyghe's After ALife Ahead

Master's thesis. Supervised by Noit Banai. University of Vienna. 2019.

This article examines the participation of Kwakwaka'wakw hereditary chief, wood carver, political activist, and contemporary artist Beau Dick at documenta 14 held in 2017. On this occasion, Beau Dick produced masks for ritual use as well as for the art market. To mediate the ongoing dispute between artwork and ethnographical object, and to overcome this historically conditioned binary opposition, this text examines artistic practices stemming from a non-Western background.

Shifting Perspectives: Beau Dick's Multi-Layered Strategy of Agency on documenta 14

All-Over. Magazin für Kunst und Aesthetik. #15. 2019.

The Last of Us stands in a long tradition of post-apocalyptic narratives that have enjoyed a revival in the twenty-first century, but in what ways is this narrative used to construct a certain stance on morality? And how does it connect to the representation of nature?

The Naturalization of Humanity and the Construction of Morality in the Last of Us

Contemporary Matters Journal. #1. 2019.