Politics of the Machines (POM) is an international platform dedicated to exploring the shifting relations between humans, machines, and the ecologies of mediation that bind them. Since its inception, POM has brought together artists, theorists, researchers, designers, and technologists to examine how forms of agency, perception, and communication emerge across human and nonhuman systems.

POM emerged from discussions about the persistent gap between academic structures and the innovative nonacademic practices of artistic and experimental research. This distinction, reinforced by formalized structures and a lack of inclusive frameworks capable of accommodating diverse forms of knowledge and creative production, continues to impact how institutions respond to experiments and the innovation capacity of the arts. POM positions itself against these limitations by fostering dialogue across a wide range of expertise, backgrounds, and perspectives, reaching far beyond conventional disciplinary or institutional boundaries. Its aim is the cultivation of a space where artistic, cultural, scientific, technological and theoretical practices can meet, challenge one another, and collaboratively rethink the conditions under which knowledge is produced.

The thematic core of POM lies in examining how machines and technologies influence, contextualize, and transform artistic and cultural production, as well as our evolving perception of the world. POM investigates the histories, theories, and practices of machines in-between and beyond disciplines, engaging critically with the scientific and humanistic ideas that shape technological imaginaries. POM continues to investigate how the relationality and operationality of machines and systems are negotiated into cultural and social ontologies, how experimental artistic practices generate new epistemologies beyond entrenched dualisms, and what kinds of political, ecological, and conceptual stakes emerge from these negotiations. It addresses the infrastructures, systems, and hybrid agencies that shape the field of artistic production, including biological, cybernetic, uncanny, and darkly ecological practices, and it considers the relational on-going dynamics between human and non-human actors.

The POM-conference values multiplicity, decentralisation, and diversity of situated knowledge. It views technological and cultural production not as the expression of a singular authority but as an activity of a networked organism. POM operates as a distributed international research and art platform, unfolding across multiple geographies, institutions, and practices. Rather than a centralised entity, POM is a connective tissue, a space where aesthetic inquiry meets technological experimentation and philosophical reflection. Each edition collaborates with a different host to form a temporary site of encounter where ideas, artworks, and research articulate new configurations of technicity, media, and the political. It brings together scholars, academics, artists, technologists, curators, and practitioners who operate across sectors, geographies and cultural contexts for challenging inherited assumptions about machines, culture, and knowledge formation.

Originally founded by Laura Beloff and Morten Søndergaard, Politics of the Machines (2018) began as a conference series and expanded over the years through sustained collaboration and shared inquiry. Today, the POM conference is carried forward by Laura Beloff, Hassan Choubassi, and Joe Elias, who will continue to inspire its broad network of participants, institutions, and contexts, together with the incoming board members (tba). What began as a focused effort to bridge disciplinary divides has developed into a structure that celebrates research, artistic production, and critical engagement across borders, continuing POM’s commitment to questioning, imagining, and shaping the politics of the machines that inform our world.