Speakers & Moderators

Krzysztof Pijarski
Visual artist, theorist, and researcher of visual culture. His practice combines work with media, critical reflection on image technologies, and academic research at the Łódź Film School. As both photographer and art historian, he explores photography as an epistemic medium — not merely documenting, but actively shaping reality, memory, and knowledge. Since 2010 he has taught at the Łódź Film School, where in 2015 he founded and has since directed the Visual Narrative Laboratory (vnLab), an interdisciplinary centre for experimental narrative forms in VR, experimental film, photobooks, digital publishing, and interactive art. Co-initiator of Future Fragments, a platform investigating new relations between technology and artistic practice.

Jakub Depczyński
Art historian, curator, and researcher affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he develops the museum’s public programme, which extends beyond the exhibition format to include performances, debates, artist talks, and events bridging art with activism, education, and civic life. He is particularly active at the intersection of art and technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence and digital ecologies. Co-initiator of Future Fragments, exploring the interplay of technology and artistic imagination.

Noviki (Katarzyna Nestorowicz & Marcin Nowicki)
Warsaw-based design and research studio working at the intersection of art, design, and new technologies. Their practice investigates the creative and critical potential of artificial intelligence, generative algorithms, and immersive digital media. For Noviki, technology is not only a tool but an active partner in the creative process. Projects such as Dream of the Machine employ AI to construct speculative, sensory experiences — from neural-network hallucinations to interactive augmented-reality environments. Their interdisciplinary work merges graphic design, video, code, and narrative, situating itself between technological experimentation and critical cultural reflection. Noviki are also co-initiators of Future Fragments.

Roosje Klap
Roosje Klap (she/her) is a researcher and mixed-media artist who explores new forms of design in collaboration with artists, curators, architects, designers, and writers and is based in Groningen. With her collective ARK, she develops projects that make modern technologies open, inclusive, and fair spaces for participation. Since May 1, 2024, she has been the Artistic and General Director of Noorderlicht, a platform for photography and lens-based media. Roosje is also an experienced educator and has created courses and led workshops on design, media art, and digital humanities at art academies and universities worldwide. She serves on the boards of governors of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Oude Kerk Amsterdam.

Niels Schrader
Niels Schrader is founder of the Amsterdam-based design studio Mind Design and head of the master programme Non Linear Narrative at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. In his role as an educator, Schrader focuses on social, political and environmental processes driven and influenced by digital technologies. In this capacity, he has initiated a number of large-scale academic research projects together with governmental and non-governmental organisations like the Dutch Parliament, National Archives, Free Press Unlimited, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Together with Jorinde Seijdel he published in 2024 Acid Clouds: Mapping Data Centre Topologies (nai010 Publishers) in which they investigate the massively resource-intensive and earthbound properties of digital storage.

Patricia Reed
Artist, theorist, and designer based in Berlin. Since 2019 she has taught theory at the Design Academy Eindhoven, co-directing the master’s programme Critical Inquiry Lab since 2022. Her practice fuses philosophy, design, and speculative research, focusing on epistemology, technology, ecology, and geopolitics. Reed investigates how material and immaterial structures shape political imagination at a planetary scale. She co-authored the Xenofeminist Manifesto as part of the collective Laboria Cuboniks, a milestone in feminist and techno-critical theory. She currently pursues research in the project Figuring Planetary Space (International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam) and collaborates with the global research programme Antikythera.

Artists – Film Programme

Ewelina Węgiel – Escarpment (2025)
Stories are not carried by words alone, nor woven by humans alone. Who creates the myths that shape our world? In Escarpment, Węgiel lends her voice to the Escarpment — or perhaps it is the Escarpment that possesses her. During her residency at Ujazdowski Castle, she studied the layered history of the site by day, and at night filmed in collaboration with the landscape itself. Immersed in associations and contexts, she transformed her findings into moving images and sound. A meditation on history, voice, and the difficulty of telling a simple story.

Ewelina Węgiel
Visual artist and filmmaker working with experimental video, sound, and performance. Her projects engage with landscape, history, and memory through poetic, site-specific approaches.

Agnieszka Polska – The Book of Flowers (2023)
The Book of Flowers is a short science-fiction film that combines Artificial Intelligence-powered animation with 16mm film pre-production, presenting an alternative history of the human-plant ecology, where floral species and humans for millennia existed in close symbiosis.

Agnieszka Polska is best known for her analytical and multi-layered video installations with a hypnotic quality. Her practice centers on the role of the individual within the collective, often reflecting on her own position as an artist and on the function of art in society. Polska investigates the ethical ambiguities that arise from being both part of and a producer of shared reality. Her works explore the tension between universality and individual existence, while examining the mechanisms that shape this movement—image, technology, language, poetry, imagination, and perception.

Noviki – Dream of the Machine (2024)
A speculative film essay exploring the hallucinatory capacities of artificial intelligence. By treating AI as a dreaming entity, the work stages a sensory dialogue between human imagination and machinic vision. AI-generated imagery is likened to the emergence of a new species in a garden, connecting technology to nature. At its centre stands a fluid, generative protagonist who shifts gender and age, while the AI itself dreams of becoming a gardener. Hallucinations are compared to human perception, and the figure of the “angel of history” is invoked to reflect on the trajectory of technological development.

Noviki (Katarzyna Nestorowicz & Marcin Nowicki)
Warsaw-based design and research duo exploring the intersections of art, design, and new technologies. Their practice embraces AI, generative systems, and speculative visual narratives.

Kuba Mikurda – Solaris Mon Amour (2023)
Solaris Mon Amour is a cinematic essay built entirely from fragments of archival educational films sourced from the Film Educational Studio in Łódź. Through an intricate process of montage, Mikurda and editor Laura Pawela craft a visual poem that resonates with themes from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris — love, memory, and the limits of human understanding. The film uses found footage not to illustrate Lem’s novel, but to evoke its atmosphere: the tension between science and the unknown, intimacy and estrangement, knowledge and imagination. Solaris Mon Amour is both a meditation on the act of seeing and a bold reimagining of what documentary cinema can be.

Kuba Mikurda
Polish filmmaker, critic, and cultural theorist. He works with archival materials and experimental montage, creating poetic essay films such as Love Express (2018) and Solaris Mon Amour (2023). He teaches at the Łódź Film School.