The entire cultural output of humanity is being fed into AI, and we are here to offer resistance. Join us for an afternoon exploring the Reverse Contradictionary, a "Dictionary of New Wor(l)ds" created by net.artist Vuk Ćosić, the collective IOCOSE, and academic/artist Vladan Joler. Published in December 2025, the book presents confrontational neologisms designed to challenge and overturn the predatory, algorithmic logic of statistical language.

We'll start by introducing the project, its approach, and some of its most provocative entries, brought to life through illustrations by Vladan Joler.

In the second half of the session, participants will be divided into small groups and invited to invent new words: neologisms that push back against the computational mediocrity of Large Language Models. Through rapid brainstorming and collective making, your contributions could find their way into a future edition of the book (with full credit given!).

This event brings together academics, artists, postgraduate students, and practitioners from arts and culture institutions for an afternoon of creative exchange, critical debate, and playful resistance. No prior expertise in linguistics, technology, or the arts is required.

A drinks reception will follow.

About the speakers

Vuk Ćosić is a canonized classic of net.art and a co-founder of the nettime and Syndicate mailing lists as well as the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. He has exhibited in many well-known galleries and museums, and has lectured in several dozen art academies while, apparently, withstanding the test of time. He refuses to run his life like a business, but his work is being written about, quoted, imitated, and even collected. His basic education as an archaeologist combined with an avant-gardist ethos has provided him with both the long view and rapid bursts of passion necessary for working in the critical media arts. He sometimes writes about himself in the third person.

IOCOSE (Matteo Cremonesi, Filippo Cuttica, Davide Prati, Paolo Ruffino) investigate how the narratives surrounding the future of technology leave traces on the present. They have been exhibiting their work at some of the major artistic institutions, including Tate Modern (2011), Aksioma (2011, 2023), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2017), The Photographers Gallery (2018, 2016), Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2022), MAMbo (2018), Science Gallery (2012), Jeu de Paume (2011), FACT (2012), Transmediale (2013, 2015), and featured in publications such as Flash Art, Neural, Liberation, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Wired, and The Creators Project.

Prof. dr. Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends critical and system design, data investigations, counter-cartography, data visualization, and numerous other disciplines. He explores and visualizes different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society. In 2023, in collaboration with Kate Crawford, he published Calculating Empires, a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures have co-evolved over five centuries. In 2018, also with Kate Crawford, he published, Anatomy of an AI System, a large-scale map and long-form essay investigating the human labor, data and planetary resources required to build and operate an Amazon Echo device.