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A Machine as Complex as the World Itself
18.08.2026
> Reserve your free spot here
A first gathering towards Bergen Assembly 2028
11–12 September 2026
Korskirken, Bergen
With: James Bridle, Alice Bucknell, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcus Coates, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Simone Ghetti, Simone Kotva, Kei Kreutler, Lars Bang Larsen, Chiemi Shimada, Ellen Viste, Lua Vollaard, Mark Thomas Young
In September 2026, Bergen Assembly will take the first steps towards its 2028 edition. Convened by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos and conceived as a two-day gathering and an open research process, A Machine as Complex as the World Itself invites artists, musicians, scientists, storytellers, and local audiences to collectively shape the questions, concerns, and lines of inquiry that will guide the development of Bergen Assembly 2028. At the gathering’s heart, is a desire to approach technology as an ancestral and ongoing practice of world-making, extending far beyond the horizon of computation.
While acknowledging that technology has become synonymous with the digital, we return to its broader relationship with tools, techniques, and forms of practical knowledge. We approach technological capacity as widespread, interspecies, and irreducible to capitalist production. How do humans, animals, plants, spirits, and machines make and adapt worlds, share emotions, transmit knowledge, foresee change, and alter states of being? What becomes visible when these capacities are approached as technologies? Exhibitions, symposia, performances, rituals, songs, maps, and assemblies, can themselves be understood as technologies: ways of convening people, things, and ideas, and of making relationships perceptible.
Bergen itself is rich in the histories, practices, and forms of knowledge through which Bergen Assembly 2028 will develop. The city's extensive legacy of cartography, maritime exchange, scientific collecting and geographical education connects Bergen to long traditions of seeing, mapping and producing spatial knowledge. Bergen’s place in the history of meteorology, particularly through the Bergen School of Meteorology and its legacy in climate science, inspires a reflection on the many techniques through which societies encounter uncertainty and seek access to what cannot be immediately known: forecasting, predicting, divination, modelling, weather lore, astronomy, and practices of transcendence. A Machine as Complex as the World Itself will also consider Bergen’s cultural and geographic relationships to oral transmission, song, storytelling, and the richness of Northern cosmologies, approaching memory as a technique through which knowledge is stored, performed, repeated, and reactivated.
Across these exchanges moves a transversal force: ecstasy, embraced as a state that interrupts the day-to-day operations of the self, exceeds usefulness, unsettles the organisation of productive life, and allows feeling and intelligence to meet in unexpected ways. Ecstasy appears without announcing itself: through music, ritual, hypnosis, movement, theory, and moments of shared observation. It offers a way of asking what knowledge may become when it is produced, felt, sung, moved, weathered, and transformed.
Participants span the arts, humanities, and sciences and include artist and writer James Bridle, whose recent publication, Ways of Being, connects computation to ecological complexity; artist Alice Bucknell, whose artistic practice includes videogame design and environmental damage; curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, whose recent research approaches the angelic and the agentic across art, technology and theological traditions; Marcus Coates, whose artistic language investigates ways of connecting with the natural environment in a post-natural world; artist Nolan Oswald Dennis who will take the audience through a listening exercise featuring sounds from the Earth and the sky; musician Simone Ghetti, whose work explores the intersection of harmony, dissonance and noise; theologian Simone Kotva, author of the recent book Ecologies of Ecstasy, on mystical contemplation and vegetal life; writer and researcher Kei Kreutler, whose work explores cultural narratives of technology; curator Lars Bang Larsen, whose reflections will address what ecstasy could mean today in the wake of psychedelic countercultures; artist Chiemi Shimada, whose short film mmm traces a history of clouds in Japanese cinema since the 1920s; climate scientist Ellen Viste, whose two recent books, Tales of the Wind and Temperature, combine narratives from science, history, and journeys through nature to help us understand the weather and the elements; curator and artist Lua Vollaard, whose lecture-performance will address the untold feminist histories of the microchip; and philosopher Mark Thomas Young, who discusses the making and unmaking of tools and objects from the perspective of maintenance and repair.
Taking place at Korskirken in Bergen over the course of an evening and a day, A Machine as Complex as the World Itself is open to all and free of charge. The gathering opens on the evening of 11 September. The programme continues throughout Saturday, 12 September, with conversations, performances, music, screenings, and collective forms of inquiry that will begin to shape the questions of Bergen Assembly 2028.
Schedule
Friday, 11 September
16:30Welcome drink at Bergen Assembly
Halfdan Kjerulfsgate 4
18:00–19:30 (Doors open at 17:30)
- Film screening: Chiemi Shimada, mmm (2023, 7’06’’)
- Listening exercise: Nolan Oswald Dennis, Earth/Sky
- Live concert by Simone Ghetti
Korskirken, Nedre Korskirkeallmenningen 20
This September, Nolan Oswald Dennis is in residency at Bergen Kunsthall’s Live studio, developing a new project for the Kunsthall’s 2027 Live Commission
Saturday, 12 September
11:00–19:00Korskirken, Nedre Korskirkeallmenningen 20
11:00–13:30:
- Introduction by Filipa Ramos and Lucia Pietroiusti, convenors of Bergen Assembly’s 2028 edition
- Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, A Fraction After Now: the Angelic-Agentic dimension. Prolegomena to a Theory of Subjectivity in the 21st century
- Simone Kotva, Ecologies of Ecstasy
- Kei Kreutler, Interior Computing
13:30–14:30: Lunch break
14:30–16:00:
- Mark Thomas Young, Artifacts are Never Tamed: Maintenance and the Philosophy of Technology
- Alice Bucknell, A Planet of Feeling
- Lars Bang Larsen, Ecstasy Zones in the Real
16:00–16:20: Comfort break
16:20–19:00:
- Ellen Viste, Feeling and Foreseeing
- James Bridle, We Build to Learn, We Learn to Build
- Lua Vollaard, The Manual for Superfluous Motions
- Marcus Coates
Full time schedule will be available soon.
Lucia Pietroiusti stewards research and experimentation in art, ecology, and systems. She is Head of Research & Emergence at Hartwig Museum, Amsterdam, opening in 2028; and the curator of the 6th Autostrada Biennale (Prizren, Kosovo, 2027). She founded Serpentine’s General Ecology project (2018-2025); and curated Sun & Sea by Rugile Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė (58th Venice Biennale and tour, 2019-2025). Pietroiusti is Chair of the Board of Trustees at Forma, London.
Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a writer and curator whose long-term research investigates art's relationship to ecology. She is particularly interested in animals and time-based media. Ramos teaches at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel and is Curator of the 2027 edition of LIAF. Her most recent book, The Artist as Ecologist (2025), discusses the ways in which contemporary artists embrace environmentalism.
James Bridle is a writer, artist, and carpenter. They are the author of New Dark Age (2018), on the cultural effects of technology, Ways of Being (2022), on more-than-human intelligence, and a forthcoming book on learning to build in uncertain times. Their artworks are exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. These days they live on an island in the Mediterranean and are mostly concerned with self-built housing, community energy, water management, and creative ecological practices.
Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Their work explores videogames as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations, and forms of knowledge. Bucknell is generally interested in the ecological dimensions of play as an embodied technology that dissolves binaries between human and nonhuman, natural and synthetic intelligence, and self vs world. Their videogame Earth Engine speculates on the idea of planetary play, inverting typical gaming hierarchies by centering the planet as the main player and casting the human operator as an NPC.
Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Centre Pompidou (Paris), Canyon (NY), Biennale Gherdëina (IT), the V&A Museum (London), the MUNCH Triennial (Norway), Counterpublic Triennial (US), the Venice Architecture Biennale and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. Their work sits in institutional collections including SFMOMA, the V&A Museum, KADIST, MUDAC, and Kunsthalle Praha. A recipient of the 2025 Creative Capital Award and an inaugural participant in Serpentine's Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship (2026-2027), Bucknell is currently a Visiting Professor at UC Davis and faculty at SCI-Arc and UCLA (Los Angeles).
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (b. 1957) is a curator, author, art historian, and retired museum director. She is currently Honorary Guest Professor at the FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Basel.
Since delivering her 2023 Novo Nordisk lecture, Prolegomena to a theory on artistic freedom, at the University of Copenhagen, she has been exploring 21st-century subject formation through a global lecture series. This research—which weaves together reflections on angels, engineers, agents, autism, and dementia—will culminate in the exhibition Hallucinangels, opening in China in early 2028.
Christov-Bakargiev began curating exhibitions in the late 1980s. Grounded in ecological insights drawn from Arte Povera and the Mediterranean world where her practice is situated, she served as the Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13) from 2009 to 2012, where she pioneered the integration of multi-species co-evolution and quantum states into contemporary curatorial practice.
Marcus Coates is an artist who lives and works in London. From his attempts to become animal to his vicarious experiences on behalf of people, his work offers an inquiry into the degrees to which we can understand, know, and relate to others. Often performative — using a process of radical empathy as motivation to create, examine, and critique relational tools — he tests actual and perceived boundaries between individuals, within communities, and with other species. New ways of relating are proposed and often put into practice. His approach is often functional and keeps a social and ecological impact in mind.
Coates is currently Artist in Residence at King’s College, Cambridge University, 2025/26: He was Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, 2023,: The first recipient of the James Lovelock Commission 2014: Nominated for the 4th Plinth Commission, 2014: Winner of the inaugural Daiwa Art Prize, 2009: Recipient of a Paul Hamyln Award in 2008. He was the Co-Founder of Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, UK. He is represented by Kate MacGarry, London.
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores ‘a black consciousness of space’ - the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization - questioning histories of space and time through system-specific interventions.
They hold a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits, 2012) and a Science Master’s degree in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, 2018).
They work within and against a grammar of world-making: using indexical, analytic and educational devices (drawings, diagrams, maps, models, etc) as ambiguous tools for rehearsing possible meaning rather than forms of instruction. Their practice recombines social, technical, political and spiritual systems grounded in a planetary condition of landlessness. Approaching technical data as an abstraction of social energy in the widest sense that includes all bodies misrecognized by the category of the human.
They have been featured in group exhibitions at FRONT Triennial (Cleveland), Lagos Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, MACBA (Barcelona), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Young Congo Biennale, the 61st Venice Biennale among others.
They are a member of artist groups NTU and Index Literacy Program, a research associate with the VIAD Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg, and a member of the Edouard Glissant Art Fund Scientific Committee
Simone Ghetti. Based in Bergen, Norway, Simone explores textures at the intersection of harmony, dissonance and noise, creating evolving works that invite listeners to form their own relationship with sound. Each project begins with a defined framework of electronic and/or acoustic instruments. Through improvisation, he tests these limits to develop a distinctive vocabulary of textures and gestures.
After years of releasing music under various pseudonyms and performing in small bands, Simone began working under his own name in 2020. Since then, he has released four albums. His last album, Drivt, was issued digitally and on cassette by UK based experimental label, Bloxham Tapes. His work has also been featured in the virtual exhibition, Yggdrasil Nine Worlds, in conjunction with Envelope Festival 2023. He has played live in concerts organized by Bulldozer and Bloxham Tapes - two concert series devoted to noise and experimental music. Most recently, he performed live at Kokong Festival in Åland.
Simone Kotva is a theologian and writer who teaches at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a scholar-practitioner of Western mysticism with a training in philosophical theology. The way Simone sees it, every mystical text is an invitation to experiment, practice and observe results.
Simone is the author of Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Ecologies of Ecstasy: Mysticism, Philosophy and Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2026). She researches neglected contact zones between Western Christian mysticism and philosophy, ecology and more-than-human worlds. Her work has appeared in journals such as Modern Theology, Environmental Humanities, Journal of Philosophy and Theology, Religion & Literature, Worldviews and Theory, Culture & Society.
Kei Kreutler explores how cultural narratives of technology shape what worlds we can build. As a Lead Researcher at the Protocol Institute, she facilitates an interdisciplinary research group on memory, technology, and culture. Her forthcoming book, Artificial Memory, places emerging technologies in a much longer history of mnemonics. Her work draws on five years directing strategy at Gnosis, a software company where she built leading decentralized tools for organizational governance. Now living in the northeast United States, she stewards New Water, a nascent mountainside campus.
Lars Bang Larsen is a writer and curator based in Thy and Copenhagen. His research revolves around the limits of Western art, ideas, and technologies, and the mindbodies they have affected in the modern era.
He has (co-)curated exhibitions such as the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016); Mud Muses. A Rant About Technology at Moderna Museet Stockholm (2019); and Vibeke Tandberg. They Live at Kode in Bergen (2026). His publications include The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society 1968 (MACBA, 2010), Networks (MIT Press, 2015), and Arte y norma (Cruce Casa, 2016).
His PhD A History of Irritated Material (2011) dealt with the psychedelic as a roaming trope and its transculturation in neo-avantgarde art. The im/possibility - then and now - of a politics of ecstasy, and of an experience between experiences, are the starting points for his talk at A Machine as Complex as the World Itself.
Chiemi Shimada is a London-based artist and filmmaker whose practice spans film, performance, installation, and participatory workshops. She explores memory, modernity, liminal experiences, and the social realities of late-stage capitalism, creating works that investigate how histories, identities, and relationships are formed and reimagined.
mmm traces an eclectic constellation of clouds across Japanese cinema from the 1920s to the present. Taking inspiration from the film materials of physicist and cloud expert Masanao Abe (1891–1966) and from scientist Tapio Schneider's speculation that climate change could one day produce a cloudless sky, the film treats formlessness as an essential actor in the history of cinema.
Her work has been presented at galleries, museums, and film festivals internationally, including IFFR (Rotterdam), Open City (London), Courtisane (Ghent), Arkipel (Jakarta), ICA London, Barbican (London), Cineteca Nacional México (Mexico City), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), and the National Archives of Singapore.
Ellen Viste is a meteorologist and former climate researcher, now working with climate science communication. She combines meteorology with interdisciplinary environmental research to understand changing weather systems and water resources and has a PhD in meteorology from the University of Bergen. Her experience in the dissemination of weather and climate science extends back to the 1990s. She lives in Bergen, a city known for its rain and as the cradle of modern weather forecasting. Viste is also active in science communication, exploring how climate knowledge can be shared across disciplinary and public contexts. She has written the books Vindens historier and Temperatur.
Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer whose practice inquires into the codes that govern and how they shape the public domain. Projects engaged with the intersection of technology and ideology, disclosing the materiality of technologies that mediate our understanding of the world. Her current project the art history of the microchip, shines a light into the technologies underpinning most of our contemporary life. Vollaard is one half of Superkilogirls, which researches the material infrastructures of computing and its entanglement with women’s labour.
Mark Thomas Young is a philosopher of technology whose work focuses on practices of maintenance and repair and examines what happens to artefacts and systems after they’re built. By exploring technologies as diverse as bridges and smartphones, his research reveals how individual technologies can be understood as processes that are guided through time by practices of retrofitting, adaptation, preservation and repair. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Philosophy Department at the University of Paderborn and the University of Oslo.
Young has previously held fellowships at TU Delft and the University of Vienna, where he led the EU funded project How Artifacts Acquire Agency. He currently chairs the research group Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology which he founded at the Society of Philosophy of Technology (SPT) in 2022. Together with Mark Coeckelbergh, he is editor of Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology: Keeping Things Going (Routledge 2024) and Process Philosophy and Technology: New Directions (Routledge 2026).