20 Apr 2026
From Satellites to Bees: Kyriaki Goni on Invisible Systems and Radical Hope
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
Greek artist Kyriaki Goni’s practice unfolds at the porous threshold between technological systems, speculative ecologies, and the politics of knowledge production. Her works often take the form of installations, moving image, research-based assemblages, and narrative constructs that weave together science fiction, data politics, collective memory, and ecological imaginaries.
Trained in fine arts and informed by interdisciplinary research, Goni’s projects frequently examine how systems of classification, surveillance, extraction, and communication reorganise both human and non-human relations. She is particularly attentive to invisible networks: data flows, technological protocols, and institutional mechanisms that govern access to information. In this sense, her work participates in a broader post-digital sensibility, where the digital is no longer perceived as novel or immaterial but as deeply embedded within material, environmental, and political realities. The artist’s language — at once poetic, speculative, and analytical — often mobilises fictional devices, alternative archives, and hybrid mythologies to interrogate dominant technological narratives.
Across recent years, Goni has explored themes ranging from algorithmic governance and digital colonialism to planetary infrastructures and more-than-human communication. Her projects propose alternative modes of sensing and storytelling, foregrounding fragility, ambiguity, and interdependence. This trajectory finds a compelling articulation in her current solo exhibition, Telling the Bees (2025), presented at The Breeder in Athens. The exhibition’s title evokes premodern rituals of interspecies communication while simultaneously resonating with contemporary anxieties around ecological collapse, technological mediation, and the limits of language. Here, Goni’s work appears less concerned with representing technology than with reimagining relationality itself — asking how we might narrate, transmit, and inhabit knowledge in an era defined by both hyperconnectivity and systemic rupture.
Goni’s practice does not reproduce the visual vocabulary of digital culture so much as it critically inhabits its conditions. Her works trace the entanglements between networks and bodies, infrastructures and myths, computation and affect. By staging encounters between speculative fiction and socio-technical analysis, Goni constructs spaces where viewers are invited not simply to interpret images but to reconsider their own embeddedness within technological and ecological systems.
Alexander Burenkov: You have developed a body of work that is frequently situated within post-digital discourse, though your projects resist easy categorisation. How do you personally understand this term, and does it resonate with how you think about your practice?
Kyriaki Goni: The term “post-digital” resonates with me insofar as it describes a condition rather than a style. For me, it signals the moment when the digital is no longer novel, visible, or exceptional, but ambient and infrastructural. We no longer “enter” the digital; we inhabit worlds structured by it. The digital is no longer a medium — it is war, climate, logistics, governance, migration, desire. It is infrastructure. However, I am cautious of the term when it becomes aesthetic shorthand. My practice is less about referencing digital culture and more about examining how digital infrastructures shape perception, governance, and planetary imagination. In works like Sensing the Heat (wip), where an Earth-observation satellite becomes one of the protagonists in a dialogue, or The Drift of an Alien (2025), which engages through technological imaginaries with the lionfish, an invasive species, the digital is neither subject nor medium alone. It is a condition of sensing and knowing. So yes, the term resonates — but my work does not try to represent digital culture. It tries to inhabit the systems that produce it.
AB: Rather than treating digital technologies as mere tools or subjects, you approach them as environments — epistemic, social, and affective infrastructures that shape contemporary life and engage with its underlying structures. What draws you to these invisible systems?
KG: I am drawn to what operates beneath the visible interface. The systems that interest me are those that quietly structure reality: satellite constellations mapping chlorophyll fluorescence, predictive climate simulations, data infrastructures that classify intimate love, life, ecological monitoring systems that translate more-than-human signals into actionable metrics. These systems shape policy decisions, reinforce bias, resource distribution, environmental governance — yet they remain largely abstract to public imagination. I see artistic practice as a way to render them perceptible without reducing them to spectacle. In Sensing the Heat (wip), the work I am developing within the STARTS EC(H)O residency with the European Space Policy Institute, the fluorescence measured by ESA’s FLEX satellite is not directly visible to humans. It exists as spectral data, as a trace of plant metabolism under heat stress. By materialising this invisible emission in a uranium-glass plant that glows under UV light, and actual heat conditions in the installation, I attempt to create a sensorial bridge — not to simplify the technology, but to open it to reflection. Invisible systems fascinate me because they are where power operates most quietly. I am drawn to these systems because they feel planetary in scale but intimate in consequence and it is where the future is quietly negotiated in a way.
AB: Many of your works operate through speculative narratives. What role does fiction play in addressing very real technological and political conditions?
KG: Fiction allows me to enter systems that are otherwise inaccessible. Space exploration and policy, AI generation, ecological sensing — these are highly technical domains. Speculation creates a threshold where complexity can be approached without simplification. In Telling the Bees (2025), ritual and fabulation are used to rethink cross-species communication in a post-apocalyptic archipelago devastated by overtourism and extraction. The Drift of an Alien (2025), invasive species drift through maritime infrastructures like ghosts of globalisation. In the Translating Silence (wip) a speculative machine translation attempts to decode sperm whale codas — but the translations hesitate, fail, produce projections. Speculation is not escapism; it is a method of reframing. It enables me to ask: What if satellites could be understood as relational actors? What if plants were considered co-producers of knowledge? What if space governance integrated feminist or Indigenous epistemologies or other intelligences? What if we all became Beeseekers as in the Telling the Bees (2025)? Fiction in my work is not only about predicting possible futures; it is also a method to approach systems that are too large, too technical, too sealed. It introduces fragility into systems that claim precision. Fiction is a survival strategy that opens the “otherwise.”
AB: How has your relationship to digital technologies shifted over time, especially as the digital has become increasingly ubiquitous and infrastructural?
KG: I would say that already quite early in my practice, I have come to understand digital technologies as infrastructural and planetary in scale. I have realized from the beginning that the digital is not something I just use, it is entangled with massive infrastructures that remain sort of invisible to the end user, energy grids, geological processes, hidden labor, climate systems, agricultural cycles, migration patterns and it goes on. You can already see this approach in earlier work of mine such as Deletion Process_Only you can see my history (2013) or The Aegean Datahaven_A cooperative platform in the archipelago (2017). So, the digital was never something I “used”; it was from the beginning of my practice something I interrogated as a condition that reorganises perception, relation to the non-human and responsibility. In the same way, I have never used digital technology in my installations for its own sake, but only when the narrative I wanted to articulate — or the world I was constructing — genuinely required that technology to exist.
AB: Your practice frequently addresses systems of knowledge production and classification. Do you see parallels between data infrastructures and older epistemological regimes?
KG: Absolutely. Contemporary data infrastructures inherit logics from earlier regimes of classification: colonial mapping, taxonomies, extraction-based cartographies. Colonial cartography claimed to map the world objectively while reorganising it for extraction. Contemporary Earth observation claims to monitor the planet scientifically while enabling new forms of management, optimisation and war. Satellites produce planetary images that resemble earlier imperial gazes — comprehensive, detached, totalising. But there is also rupture. Unlike colonial maps, most satellite data can and must circulate globally, inform climate justice, and expose environmental crime. This data contains emancipatory potential. I am interested in this tension. How can planetary data avoid reproducing extractive epistemologies? How can it become relational rather than dominant? In Sensing the Heat (wip), fluorescence data is not presented as objective truth but as a relational signal — co-produced by plant metabolism, solar radiation, sensor calibration, algorithmic interpretation, and policy frameworks. Data is never neutral; it is always situated.
AB: Your projects often blur boundaries between human and non-human perspectives. How does technology mediate or complicate these relationships?
KG: Technology does not simply connect species; it filters and formats them. It both expands perception and risks projection. It allows humans to hear more-than-human worlds, but it also forces those worlds into categories humans understand. I am not interested in celebrating technological mediation blindly, nor in rejecting it. I am interested in dwelling in its instability. So, my way to achieve that is by blurring these boundaries between physical and digital, human and machine, to examine critically how the tech systems and tech elites shape our reality, culture, politics. In The Drift of an Alien, the invasive species lionfish becomes entangled with maritime infrastructures and climate shifts and as a beautiful monster shares its story in a monologue before being consumed during a communal performative dinner with tableware bearing witness of climate urgency and migration. In Telling the Bees, the game interface allows the player to see through the eyes of a bee offers a radically different view of the world that is tuned to a completely different spectrum than human vision. While humans see a world of red, green, and blue, bees possess trichromatic vision tuned to ultraviolet (UV), blue, and green. In the Translating Silence, machine translation attempts to decode sperm whale codas of a dialogue between a mother whale and her calf, only the mother remains silent due to marine heat waves and noise pollution.
AB: Can you speak about the tension in your work between analytical research and poetic or affective experience?
KG: Research is one of the main parts of my practice — I read policy documents, scientific papers, technical reports. I speak with experts. At the same time, I tend to find poetry within this research and I translate it into installations. Poetry, for me, is a way for holding complexity without closure. The tension between analytical research and poetic or affective experience keeps the work alive. I feel this experience allows the audience to feel the instability that data alone cannot express. I am thinking, for instance, of the installation We Shall by Morning Inherit the Earth (2025). Commissioned for the exhibition Fungi: Anarchist Designers at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, the work was developed in collaboration with Dr. Matteo Garbelotto from the University of California, Berkeley. The work draws on his decades-long research on Heterobasidion, a destructive fungus that attacks monoculture plantations, and extends this scientific inquiry across multiple landscapes and temporalities through poetic interpretation, sound, and moving image.
AB: How do you approach visuality in a post-digital context where images are overproduced and endlessly circulated?
KG: I try to slow things down — to construct worlds, to introduce multiple points of view, and to blur the boundaries between what we conventionally call the digital and the physical. Within the installations, I work through small but deliberate gestures: a plant glowing under UV light, ceramic pots for watering bees, an apotropaic figure attached to the woven smarologos basket, a small screen framed in beeswax showing hybrid figures between humans and bees.
These elements function not as decorative details but as invitations. They encourage visitors to slow their pace, to enter the narrative space, and to allow themselves to become part of a story rather than mere observers. The work asks for presence — for a different tempo of attention, one that makes room for relationality and care.
AB: Are you interested in resisting the aesthetics commonly associated with digital culture, or is your strategy more about reframing them?
KG: I would say more reframing than resisting. I inhabit and destabilise this aesthetics. I adopt the language of digital systems to reveal their fragility, their tension, their poetics. For The Genealogy of the Beeseekers in Telling the Bees I have used a complex and unorthodox combination of hand-drawn sketches; AI generated tools and prompts to create these ambiguous figures that expand in different temporalities and aesthetics.
AB: Looking at your recent projects, do you perceive a recurring concern or question that continues to evolve across different works?
KG: Yes, in my recent projects, there is a continuously evolving question: sensing beyond the human. Whether invasive marine species, AI agents, satellite measuring plant fluorescence, bee communication dances, or whale codas — I ask: How do we listen without dominating? How do we measure without erasing? How do we care at a planetary scale? The recurring concern is planetary intelligence and coexistence.
I recently became a mother and motherhood has quietly recalibrated my understanding of sensing — attuning me to pre-verbal signals, subtle shifts, and forms of care that operate before language. This embodied experience of listening — to breath, heat, silence, distress — has deepened my engagement with non-human perception and reinforced my interest in sensing as a relational practice, while imagining possible futures became more urgent in a way.
AB: Telling the Bees at The Breeder gallery in Athens invokes a ritual of communication. What initially attracted you to this metaphor?
KG: The ritual of telling bees about significant life events- so that they don’t abandon the hive — fascinates me because it recognises bees as necessary participants in social life. It disrupts the assumption that communication belongs exclusively to humans and acknowledges, in a quiet but powerful way, their agency. In a time of ecological collapse, this gesture feels profoundly radical. That idea stayed with me as I began developing the universe of the Beeseeker, a character who inherits a basket woven from thin branches — known in Greek as a smarologos — traditionally used in various cultures to swarm and host bees. The Beeseeker navigates a collapsing archipelago in search of the last surviving swarm, carrying the responsibility of informing them of the unfolding catastrophe, hoping to prevent their departure. Faced with the potential extinction of bees — and the cascading ecological consequences such a loss would entail — the work does not offer naïve optimism, but a form of radical hope grounded in care, communication, and interdependence.
AB: How does this exhibition engage with ideas of interspecies communication, and how might this connect to contemporary technological mediation? How did the idea of creating the video game pop up in your mind?
KG: The exhibition engages interspecies communication by positioning bees not as symbols, but as co-agents and knowledge-bearers within shared ecological worlds. Through ritual (the act of “telling the bees”), embodied gestures (the waggle dance, buzzing), offerings (water, seeds), and the figure of the Beeseeker, communication is framed as reciprocal and grounded in care rather than control. The hive becomes a model of collective intelligence that exceeds human-centered notions of productivity and mastery.
This inquiry connects directly to contemporary technological mediation through the inclusion of AI-generated imagery, video interfaces, and the speculative video game environment. Technology becomes not a tool of domination, but a potential interface for attunement between human and non-human life.
The game emerged organically as I was developing the universe of the Beeseeker. The landscape, the fragmented archipelago, the mission to find and communicate with the bees, the Bee Goddess, and the obsidian ghost of a former landscape gradually formed a narrative ecology that felt inherently interactive. Players participate in systems of care: planting, watering, performing gestures of joy, and repairing fragile infrastructures. The video game, as part of the multimedia installation, deliberately retains a handmade quality, distancing itself from commercial gaming aesthetics. It challenges the male-dominated, extractive logic that often structures mainstream gameplay by centering care, reciprocity, and collective survival as mechanisms for unlocking assets and moving forward. Finally, by working in the format of a video game, I aim to engage a broader and more diverse audience, expanding the conversation beyond the conventional art space.
AB: In the context of ecological crisis and technological acceleration, what possibilities do you see for art to produce alternative narratives or imaginaries?
KG: We are living inside planetary systems we barely understand — satellites orbiting, AI warfare, data accumulating, oceans warming, species migrating. I hope my installations create spaces where part of this entanglement is felt, and dialogue and reflection can take place. Is it still possible to imagine alternative technological systems and futures? I do not believe art provides solutions, but it can destabilise inevitabilities — and that, in times of crisis, both ecological and political, is profoundly necessary.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
Previous
interview
07 Apr 2026
Timur Si-Qin on Exploring Morphogenesis, Sacredness of Living Systems and Post-Secular Ecologies
By Alexander Burenkov
PROJECT SPONSORED BY