Not all forms of power announce themselves. Some move quietly, shaping how we feel, act and inhabit the world. Increasingly, the logic of software transforms the conditions of participation, embedding control into interfaces, automating governance through terms and conditions, and configuring compliance through algorithmic sorting, behavioural prediction and the continuous management of visibility. Are You a Software Update? brings together seven authors to examine the intensifying form of totalitarianism grounded in the quiet background logic of contemporary technology.

Alberto Toscano, Alex Quicho, Nora O’ Murchú, Noura Tafeche, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne and Wassim Z. Alsindi explore how infrastructures built for scale, extraction and control have come to embody this totalising logic. They show how platforms stabilise sentiment, how images perform order and how data becomes the medium through which consent is manufactured and dissent is neutralised. Their essays reveal a world governed by calibration – a fascist tendency expressed through the everyday management of attention, emotion and presence.

COLOPHON

Are You a Software Update?

Contributors: Wassim Z. Alsindi, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, Nora O’ Murchú, Alex Quicho, Noura Tafeche, Alberto Toscano Editors: Nora O’ Murchú, Janez Fakin Janša

Design: Federico Antonini, Simone Cavallin

Published by: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Represented by: Marcela Okretič

Ljubljana, December 2025 © Aksioma | All text and image rights reserved by their respective authors