A Networking Meeting in Berlin Toward a Potential POM Japan Edition
From 18 to 20 February 2025, Politics of the Machines (POM) took part in a three-day networking meeting in Berlin titled The Life of Signals?, hosted at the Medientheater of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Conceived as an exploratory and preparatory encounter, the meeting brought together researchers, artists, curators, and POM organizers from Japan, Germany, and across Europe to examine the conceptual, thematic, and organizational conditions for a potential future POM edition in Japan.
Rather than functioning as a conventional conference, the meeting was structured as an intensive working and networking format. Its aim was to cultivate dialogue, test thematic resonances, and strengthen transnational research relationships that have developed over several years between Japanese and European media theory, media archaeology, and practice-based art communities.
Context and Motivation
The Berlin meeting builds on earlier exchanges between Japanese and European researchers, notably a workshop held in Fukuoka in August 2023. That gathering brought together scholars and practitioners working with media archaeology and related theoretical frameworks, including contributors to Japanese translations of key works by Jussi Parikka and others. These discussions reaffirmed the continued relevance of media archaeology, German media theory, and practice-based research for critically engaging contemporary media and technology.
Within this context, the Berlin networking meeting was explicitly framed as a preparatory stage for a potential co-hosted POM conference in Japan. The presence of POM organizers alongside members of the Japan-based network enabled direct exchange around shared concerns, methodologies, and curatorial approaches, while opening space to consider how POM’s distributed and collaborative model could resonate within Japanese academic, artistic, and cultural contexts.
Thematic Scope
Under the provisional title The Life of Signals?, the meeting addressed the historical, material, and political dimensions of signals across analog and digital media, while extending these inquiries toward bio-media, environmental media, and more-than-human agencies.
The discussions and presentations unfolded across a closely interrelated constellation of theoretical and practice-based perspectives. These included media archaeology in relation to computation, algorithms, and technical infrastructures, alongside sustained engagement with German media theory and image science. Sound studies and visual cultures were examined in dialogue with bio-media art and the operational logics of images within technological and biological systems. At the same time, the meeting foregrounded environmental media, political ecology, and planetary thinking, situating media practices within broader ecological and more-than-human contexts. Feminist posthumanism, new materialist thought, and sympoietic practices further informed the discussions, together with critical approaches to commoning, composting, and non-human agency.
Throughout the three days, theoretical inquiry and artistic practice were treated as inseparable. The meeting foregrounded experimental, practice-based research while maintaining a strong commitment to historical contextualization and critical reflection..
Program and Contributions
The program unfolded across three days of talks, discussions, screenings, and informal exchanges.
The opening day focused on establishing a shared conceptual ground through opening remarks, participant introductions, and networking talks. Presentations explored topics such as edible and variable screens, signaling lifeforms, literature as sound media, and critical reflections on machines, sound, and perception. The day concluded with welcome conversations at the Media Archaeological Fundus, providing space for informal exchange.
The second day featured a dense sequence of presentations addressing Friedrich Kittler’s media theory and its contemporary applications, artistic engagements with biological existence, glitching machines and techno-phobia, visual pattern recognition and animal experimentation, natural computing, and bio-art practices informed by new materialist and posthuman feminist approaches. An evening program brought together screenings and talks focused on non-human sensing, archival practices, and audiovisual works engaging elemental and environmental processes.
The final day continued these explorations through presentations on the materiality and mediality of bio art, sympoietic analyses of digital culture, permeable material agencies, atmospheric and weather-based media practices, germ printing and bioluminescence, biomolecular media, media archaeology and science fiction, and embodied engagements with living systems. The meeting concluded with a closing discussion dedicated to the prospects and open questions surrounding a future POM conference in Japan.
Participants and Network
The meeting brought together a diverse group of participants from Japan, Europe, and the POM network, spanning media theory, aesthetics, sound studies, bio-art, design research, and curatorial practice.
Participants from Japan included Nobuhiro Masuda, Kazuhiro Jo, Takumi Saeki, Yosaku Matsutani, Takuya Umeda, Yuta Imazeki, Yoshitaka Ota, Shiho Hasegawa, Fuminori Akiba, and Kosuke Nagata, among others. Their contributions reflected the breadth of contemporary Japanese engagements with media archaeology, German media theory, and experimental art practices.
From Europe, participants included Shintaro Miyazaki, Sebastian Kawanami-Breu, Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz from Art Laboratory Berlin, Sophie Publig, Sybille Neumeyer, Akitoshi Honda, Peter Purg, and Alanna Lynch, representing a wide range of research and artistic approaches at the intersection of media, technology, ecology, and culture.
The POM network was represented by Laura Beloff, Joe Elias, Hassan Choubassi, and Juan Duarte Regino, contributing both organizational perspectives and practice-based research.
Toward a POM Edition in Japan
The Life of Signals? functioned as a moment of alignment and collective reflection. Rather than announcing a finalized future event, the meeting emphasized the importance of slow groundwork, shared inquiry, and relational infrastructures. It demonstrated how POM’s distributed model, rooted in collaboration and critical exchange, can serve as a flexible framework for future editions beyond its European origins.
The Berlin networking meeting confirmed strong thematic resonances between POM and existing Japanese research and artistic communities, while identifying areas that will require further collective exploration. As such, it represents a significant step toward imagining how a POM conference in Japan might take shape, both conceptually and organizationally.