This article explores the ways in which emergent cultural space-making practices—particularly practices of “instituting,” “blurring,” and “monstrous space-making”—challenge and ephemerally unsettle political and economic systems. It focuses on the history of the cultural space, EIGHT Critical Institute for Arts and Politics, in Athens, Greece. The concept of “instituting” is discussed as a form of space-making that refuses structuralization, while “blurring” signifies a process of dissolving boundaries and categories to create fluid, unpredictable spaces that resist fixed identities. The notion of “monstrous space-making” is introduced as a method of excess and refusal, capable of disrupting dominant political economies. The article argues that these practices, rooted in modes of “militant curating” and critical spatial interventions, operate as performative acts of reconfiguration—offering ways to produce new relations, economies, and imaginaries within contested landscapes. It suggests modes of continuous, open-ended spatial interventions that do not seek to fix existing systems but to deform and reimagine them from within.
Keyword: monsters
Alexa’s Monstrous Agency: The Horror of the Digital Voice Assistant
First released by Amazon in 2014, the digital voice assistant Alexa allows users to connect and automate their smart home devices through the sound of their voice. Alexa’s automation of domestic spaces comes, however, with its own set of anxieties. How much data does Alexa sense and capture, and how is this data used? How is agency distributed between humans and the machines surrounding them? Is Alexa an empowering tool, or an invasion of privacy that undermines human agency? In this paper, we trace the ways in which the anxieties surrounding the blurred boundaries of human and non-human agencies introduced by the Alexa interface are represented and negotiated across different narrative forms and archives. Firstly, we turn to the corporate promotional media produced by Amazon in selling its assistant. Secondly, we analyze Alexa’s representation in the web horror genre known as “creepypasta”—first-person narratives written in and for online communities. We frame the interplay between these archives as an entangled narrative field of contestation, which we engage with through a practice of diffractive reading. The images and ideas of each narrative corpus adapt to and are affected by the materials and tropes forwarded by the other. As a result of this interplay, Alexa becomes a monstrous placeholder for the anxieties of its users, whose erratic and pervasive agency endangers every facet of their existence. The analysis of these narratives provides valuable insights into the anxieties surrounding the ongoing encroachment of digital platforms into the lives of humans.