2024 Year In Review
A janitorial perspective at the nadir of the year.
by Martina Cavalot, Wassim Z. Alsindi, Alessandro Y. Longo, and 0xSalon
0xSalon’s 2024 Year In Review
As is becoming somewhat of a tradition—read the 2020, 2022, and 2023 editions elsewhere on our webjournal—we’re here to succinctly recap, recollect, and review the 0xSalon’s 2024.
The year that just passed – as you are surely, doubtlessly aware – was marked by political unrest and financial upheaval for those thinking and making in many places, very much including those of us located within Germany. Despite the ongoing psychopathic rhetoric and shameful actions of “liberal democratic” genocide apologists placing non-constitutional limits on critical inquiry, 0xSalon continued its operations and spearheaded yet more conversations, texts, and artistic projects.
Partially as a response to the situation in the land of Stoatsräson, and partially due to a sharp increase in invitations to spread our epistemic wings, our activities were rather more globally dispersed than in previous years. We popped up in California, Singapore, Kraków, London, Bangkok, and Dubai in addition to our usual Teutonic locales. Despite significant constraints in resources – more on that later – we were able to continue our efforts and support those of two new residents who joined us in the spring. Once again, with the support of like-minded friends, colleagues, and collaborators, we were able to find islands of joy and camaraderie in our little corner of the intellectual world.
January
We began the year steeped in the subterranean currents of power and collapse. Authored whilst taking refuge from the endless cruelty of German Errorinnerungskultur abroad, By the Rewes of Babylon and Hyperstitutions in Gigalollapalooza evoked the fragility of a nation caught in the throes of a political maelstrom. These two texts, published at the nadir of the year, set the tone for much of what was to come.
Back in Berlin, we were invited by Galerie im Turm to host our first salon of the year, which inaugurated the theme of Sensing the Unseeable, an exploration into the pictures of the human we inherit from science. In this first iteration of the topic the discussion was connected to black holes, being the theme of the exhibition during which the event took place.
The topic of the unseeable would permeate many of our encounters throughout the year, whether in the shape of formal intellectual enquiry or as a lens to make sense of the ostensible inhumanity of global conflict.
February
In early February, we celebrated four years of the 0xSalon with a gameplay-performance of 2022’s The Immaculate Misconception at panke.gallery, where performance met afterparty in true Berlin fashion.
Later in the month, we headed to London for the Cybernetic Serendipity Symposium, a conference hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Art to commemorate the seminal 1968 ICA exhibition of the same name. Here, we joined a program dense with speakers and performers to interrogate historical and contemporary roles of technology in shaping emerging artistic forms and practices.
At Art Dubai, we joined conversations on the global stage at their Digital Summit, with 0xSalon represented at a panel focused on how independent communities are unlocking the future of culture.
March
We took the chance in March to bring Sensing the Unseeable back to our historical headquarters at Trust in Berlin, where we hosted a curated salon under this banner. This time around, the conversation turned to the mystical, with participants trying to parse sense and perception from the point of view of the psyche and imagination.
How does science represent the world? What do our models teach us about ourselves, and our relationship to the Universe we inhabit? The scientific image – the world picture established by centuries of methodical and formalised discovery – shatters and recomposes the manifest image – how humankind conceives of itself – at rapid pace. With technological capacity reaching a new, vertiginous apex, the complexity of scientific discovery ambiguates our understanding of the environments we observe and inhabit instead of illuminating them. Being able to build a shared idea of ‘reality’ is the single most important task of sapience; one that is only possible through the bringing together of the scientific with the manifest. During a historical moment seemingly unable to find its centre, can (and I’ll add, should?) art and philosophy build the epistemic scaffolds necessary to protocolize sense-making in the sciences?
April
In April, Sensing the Unseeable found its way to London at the behest of colleagues at Goldsmiths, venturing deeper into the scientific and metaphysical realms where discovery and illusion intersect. This was the first 0xSalon event in the UK, which had been years in the planning: yet another bright idea temporarily scuppered by the pandemic finally taking flight.
The Nervous Systems symposium at ICA London offered yet another opportunity to reflect on the uneasy pulse of a world on the brink. In conversation with theorists, artists, and musicians, we examined the dissonant frequencies that bind our global systems: those unspoken structures that are nearing collapse, awaiting new modes of understanding, navigation, or circumvention.
May
As the northern climes began to promise glimpses of the dearly-awaited summer, we turned to the future with the announcement of the third cycle of our Research Residency Program: our informal incubator for projects spanning sound, theory, performance, and game design. This year, we were overjoyed to welcome into our fold Alessandro Y. Longo and Sammie Veeler, both working individually across disciplines as thinkers and creators, alongside their respective community-oriented practices Reincantamento and New Art City.
Both practices are grounded in collective enterprises trying to bring people together – the former as a research group investigating technology’s relationship to magic, the latter as an online archive with its physical artefact Memory Terminal in development. Our residents this year were people preoccupied with making worlds: ostensibly, 0xSalon’s main goal since its inception…though we might not have worked that out until more recently!
With an inclusion of a vast glossary of terms and character notes, we (finally) published the script for The Black Hole of Money: a theatrical play developed in 2022 as part of our S+T+ARTS ‘Repairing the Present’ residency. Alongside it, some of our governance fictions, collated as Every Prophet is a Loss, saw the light in NOIA Magazine #3: STATES, and we released the poem The Eschaton will not be Immanentised.
Taking a look at the 0xSalon through an organisational and pedagogical lens, we recorded a radio show On Alternative Education for RTM.fm with artist Aliaskar Abarkas.
June
In June, Outland released an interview with Max Haiven and 0xSalon’s own Wassim Z. Alsindi, where the two engaged in dialogue over the ideologies of crypto markets, special pennies, and the zeal for exit.
July
As summer progressed, a few of the threads initiated earlier in the year started coming together. With our residents Alessandro Y. Longo and Sammie Veeler, we inaugurated InfraWorlding – a new strand of 0xSalon research exploring the infrastructures which make (or hinder) the emergence of new worlds.
When do words become worlds? From ‘network states’ declaring autonomy through landgrabs to a pluriverse of digital gardens spanning space and screen, how do we construct new realities within the powershell of the old? What kind of digital and physical spaces guarantee zones of autonomy and self-expression? With Infraworlding, the 0xSalon stages an exploration of the infrastructures which make new worlds possible, and those which hinder their emergence, on both material and metaphysical planes. In this discussion, we seek "common ground" between digital gardens as a concept, open and persistent virtual environments in practice like newart.city, and individualist desires for exit ‘to’ and exit ‘from’ community in emerging organisational forms.
Here’s Alessandro’s take on the Berlin summer salon:
It's a warm morning in Berlin in late July. As I bike through the Tiergarten, the park's life overflows around me. Tourists wander about, scattered groups of swans drift on the lake, and sunlight catches the freshly watered grass. But I'm not here to admire this seasonal tableau. Instead, I'm racing because I'm late – or at least, I feel like I am. Tonight, we're hosting a 0xSalon at Trust as part of our residency. When I say we, I mean myself and Sammie Veeler, the artist with whom I had the fortune to share the residency, along with Wassim and Martina, 0xSalon's maintainers and curators.
The theme for this evening's Salon is "InfraWorlding," a portmanteau we coined to weave together our diverse research interests and practices – mine, Sammie's, and 0xSalon's:
“What kind of digital and physical spaces guarantee zones of autonomy and self-expression? With Infraworlding, the 0xSalon stages an exploration of the infrastructures which make new worlds possible, and those which hinder their emergence, on both material and metaphysical planes”
Typically, 0xSalon prepares a collection of resources (articles, visuals, etc.) on the theme and shares them through an Are.na channel, the creative research platform. But for this occasion – and this is why I'm speeding on my bike this late July morning – I've decided to create a booklet, a printed guide for the discussion using print.are.na, transforming this digital framework for knowledge organization into something tangible. With help from my friend Lapo Sorride, I spend the day at Trust assembling 30 zines, creating a bridge between digital and physical realms of research and knowledge curation.
The zine becomes a needed anchor for navigating the conversation, which flows naturally throughout the evening. Fascinating questions emerge about desires and fantasies of exit and their political value: should we construct one coherent techno-political counter-narrative? Or should we continue exploring a plurality of voices and visions, a patchwork tapestry of gardens, refuges, and smaller zones of autonomy? While the first option appears more reassuring, the urgency of our times keeps confronting us with the necessity of mobilizing in the here and now and intervening with more localized actions. Perhaps it's not an either/or situation – a truly diagonal techno-politics might succeed in building a shared, long-term project while simultaneously embracing local experiments in the present.
August
In a magical mountain town on the Polish-Czech border in early August, Wassim joined the Unsound LAB Summer School in Poland as mentor, guiding participants through experiments in community building through the networked knowledge production that 0xSalon has been so deeply involved in over the years.
From inland central Europe to inland central California, 0xSalon hosted an iteration of The Price of Anarchy salon topic at the 2024 edition of DWeb Camp, a five day retreat in Mendocino County for builders and dreamers of the decentralised web. Back in swampy Berlin, the month closed with a lecture titled The Chain Mail Gaze, held as part of the Web3 Summit.
September
As the summer travel eased up, we were able to spend more time at base and record an audio report for Sensing the Unseeable, our main thematic cluster for the year having held three separate discussion events with different venues, and audiences, and of course, points of conversation. Wassim and Martina were joined by Jaya Klara Brekke, Habib William Kherbek, Kathryn Lawrence & Max Haiven.
Once more in London, we ran the second session of Infraworlding at Goldsmiths, led by resident Sammie Veeler.
October
In the first days of October we were invited to take part in the discourse program for Unsound Festival in Krakow, where we embraced the chaotic beauty of randomness through our guided card game session Dissonant Cartomancies: A God that Plays Dice, using a new and expanded version of the Fau0x Salon card deck that Alessandro worked on, in the frame of their residency.
Some more words from Alessandro on this experience:
It's an early autumn evening in Kraków, and I'm at the Łaźnia Nowa Theatre during the Unsound Festival. The theater has fallen into a deafening, cathartic silence after being overwhelmed by the sonic war machine conjured by Yellow Swans, a noise duo from Portland, reunited at the festival after a long hiatus from live shows. I've never had such a transcendent experience with noise music – blissful textures of sound emerging from the white noise wall like raindrops falling on dry land.
"Noise" is this year's Unsound theme, and I'm attending alongside Wassim in my capacity as 0xSalon resident. We're here to host and moderate a panel discussion during the festival's day program under the title "Dissonant Cartomancies." Throughout my residency, I collaborated with Wassim on the salon’s discourse card game, FAU0X SALON. We expanded the deck with new entries, reworked some of the old cards, and conceived new ways to use it. Unsound offered us the stage to test one of these new approaches to destabilise one of the most rigid conversational forms: the panel discussion.
Wassim and I take the stage alongside musicians The Caretaker and Valentina Magaletti, and sound theorist Mattin to discuss the political and theoretical valence of “noise” as a concept. It feels surreal to be on such a significant stage for experimental music, let alone sitting next to some underground music legends. The FAU0X SALON deck we prepared for this occasion serves as a "stochastic moderator," leaving the conversation's guidance to chance and fate. Panel participants must draw cards, each carrying a discussion prompt. The panel's linearity is sabotaged, and the discussion transforms into a chaotic and funny dialogue that moves between personal anecdotes and theoretical considerations. The audience is engaged, our guests seem pleasantly surprised, and the bizarre eccentricity of the card deck is praised. Out of this noise emerges a delicious vitality, one that's usually suffocated by the default mode of panel discussions. In a year that often felt hermetically sealed, here was a pocket of air, possibility, and play.
We also published المستحيل مكتوب // Al-mustahil Maktoub, a meditation on impossibility and DUMBs: A Testament, by writer and 0xSalon fellowship alumnus Habib William Kherbek. These texts gave us a stark glimpse into a future fractured by political unrest—yet one in which the potential for radical change still pulses beneath the surface.
November
As the year drew to a close, and with the ingress into winter, another 0xSalon escape plan was hatched. Travelling across Asia, we hosted events at CITYCITY Gallery in Bangkok, and with Hothouse and To New Entities in Singapore.
We also worked on a little side-quest with our long-standing fontologist (sic) collaborator Darius Ou, writing a short speculative text on the improbable origins of the ‘0x’ ligature which has become our hallmark.
When legacy becomes ligature: the curious indiscretions of ‘0’. Zero shares etym(yth)ological roots with cipher in the Arabic word ṣif’r صفر. The contemporary cypherpunk movement takes its name from this linguistic heritage, aiming for privacy, concealment, and envoidening digital communication using cryptography. Universal ṣif’rage. Cuneiformalisation.
Zero began as “no-thing”.
An absence, a gap in the record, null and void.
A placeholder, a placeless space, a scry-ø imaginary.
A cloak, that adds nothing, and leaves unchanged.
A withholding, a negation, a silence.
An identity, without politics.
Never formally contained within Roman script due to its debased nature, zero’s death drive led it to bind to the ultimate symbol of refusal, the ‘x’. The perversion of the curve, and the righteousness of the rectilinear faith. A hex; a hoax; ‘0x’. The ligature of ‘0’ and ‘x’ became a virtual signifier in memoryspace. At once: a talisman, a target, a corruption. Hexadecimalevolence. The ties that bind. Constraint, contort, restrained retort.
In( )conclusion
Today, we are currently ruminating over the possible end of the 0xSalon after almost five years of counter-axiomatic operation, or at least a shift of gears towards reactive modes of engagement such as collaborations, commissions, and consultancy. With the organisation underfunded, and physically located within the irredeemable garbage dump that is currently known as the Federal Republic of Germany, the possibilities for sustainable continuation seem slimmer than before. We can no longer say what we think and feel in such a place: there is no remaining confidence in intellectual freedom in Berlin. Perhaps though, endings can also be beginnings, and either the 0xSalon – or something descended from or inspired by it – may take root, and bloom elsewhere. Perhaps, in places where the spirit of radical intellectual inquiry might has not been stifled by the génocidaires’ collective attack on intellectual expression.
If any of you – human or more–than–human – readers can think of a good place to take this epistemic circus, we’ll be very happy to hear your suggestions at the0xSalon@gmail.com.
Lastly, but certainly not leastly, we bid farewell to long-standing 0xSalon conspirator Martina Cavalot, after several years of close collaboration. Martina wrote a short statement to say goodbye. We’ll miss her a lot!
After a long tenure, the beginning of 2025 marks the year of my departure from the 0xSalon and – possibly – where our endeavour ends, at least for now. No matter how grateful for the time spent working within the bounds of this initiative, sadness is always par for the course when separating. It is however also a time for reminiscing, of which I have done a lot over the last few months, ahead of a moment I knew was incumbent. Having been involved with the project since 2021, first as curious bystander, then as resident, and finally as fellow, it has been remarkable to see 0xSalon grow and change, and to later be in the position of helping steer that change myself. I am thankful for having been given the opportunity to prod theoretical terrains which I thought I wasn’t equipped to traverse; I am thankful to have been able to mentor incredible artists and thinkers and pushed their ideas forward; most of all I am thankful to Wassim for the friendship and kinship extended to me throughout the time we have worked together. "À bientôt – looking forward to keep making the present weird together."