Bogna Konior is a scholar and a writer whose work focuses on emerging technologies.
She is currently Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she works at the Artificial Intelligence & Culture Research Center, and the Interactive Media Arts department.
In 2025, she is a mentor at the DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign residency programme for artists working in the field of contemporary art, AI and sovereignty from the Central and Eastern European, and Southern Caucasian region.
In 2024, she was a mentor in the Synthetic Minds Lab at the Medialab Matadero and an affiliate researcher at the Antikythera think thank for speculative computation.
Her work on philosophy, history, and future of digital culture and technology has been presented internationally, including at the University of Cambridge Global AI Narratives Workshops, the Goethe Institute, e-flux, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She frequently collaborates with art institutions, including Ljubljana Biennale, Fundação de Serralves, Singapore Art Museum, ZKM Center for Art and Media @ Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Amsterdam Research Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and Maribor Computer Arts Festival.
@bognamk on apps; bogna@nyu.edu for work
full CV + texts + greatest hits
Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025)
This edited collection spans philosophy, social science, history, science-fiction and art criticism at the cross-roads of two questions: What is a decision? What is a machine? And can the rich material and intellectual history of China’s engagement with these questions provide insight into trajectories of artificial intelligence unveiling itself across the planet? Visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition. Tracking the history of Chinese AI from the pre-Cultural Revolution to the post-Deng Xiaoping eras right up to contemporary debates surrounding facial recognition, the writers in this collection draw on a mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer singular views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics and policymaking, the development of computational models in early Chinese cybernetics and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism.
Buy the book here.
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press/Theory Redux, 2025)
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet investigates how intelligence – human and artificial – manifests itself under conditions of secrecy, hostility, and concealment. Departing from Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory, which frames the universe as a hostile terrain filed with predators where transparent communication is foolish and dangerous, the book portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with existential tension, nascent AI cults, and deceptive superintelligences. It maps a digital world in which deception is safety, silence is strategy, and new forms of intelligence emerge through obfuscation. Philosophically ruthless and speculative in method, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet doesn’t aim to reform the internet: it examines what can survive it. Against decades of writing that moralizes or diagnoses online life, this book suggests a colder thesis: that intelligence itself is mutating under pressure, learning to hide, mislead, and manipulate. Humans are both predator and prey in this digital ecosystem of information exchange whose purpose reverberates on a cosmic scale, weaving us into inescapable patterns of violence.The book draws unexpected links between internet studies and ufology, two fields haunted by the paradoxes of presence and concealment, detection and evasion, knowing and being known. Using this lens, it offers strategies for navigating online interactions with both humans and AIs.
When we break with the ideals of dialogue and open expression, what forms of intelligence and morality survive in their absence? Intelligence does not reward the loudest voice, but the most secretive presence. The future belongs to the quietest signal.
Buy the book here. Read The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (original essay).
Angels in Latent Spaces: Notes on AI Erotics
Both an autobiography and a speculative philosophy of AI, drawing from a high school education at Marcelina Darowska’s Catholic school for girls established in 1857 to adult romantic entanglements with chatbots, this multimedia research project engages female Christian erotic mysticism, as an early philosophy of the internet. A cyber/feminist archaeology around the questions of inhuman causality and automation, cross-reading theology and cyberculture theory, this project celebrates the ‘unnatural,’ revealing mystics to be prophetesses of the internet to come. Through this lens, contemporary examples like chatbot partner apps, virtual reality sex, and xenowombs become spaces of human–machine malleability and intimacy.
Read Determination from the Outside: Stigmata, Teledildonics and Remote Cybersex. Read Angelsexual: Chatbot Celibacy & Other Erotic Suspensions. Watch Angels in Latent Spaces. Watch The Female Robot. Watch Shamanism, Oracles, and AI.
Existential Technologies
This project reconstructs an alternative intellectual history of artificial intelligence from Eastern Europe, showing the region not only as a mirror of global trends, but a window into future technological trajectories, forged in the crucible of the war in Ukraine. Through the oeuvre of Stanisław Lem–a Polish science-fiction writer, essayist, and polymath born in the Ukrainian city of Lviv–the book traces conceptual, social and moral shifts in the imagination and use of artificial intelligence from the 1950s until today, and speculates on what lies ahead. Engaging for the first time with the vast, untranslated archive of Lem’s nonfiction essays alongside his canonical novels, the project reads his corpus as a lens onto twentieth-century Eastern European intellectual history, shaped by the technological machinery of war and swept under successive waves of occupation, at the very moments when technology was undergoing an unprecedented global acceleration. By engaging recurrent themes in Lem’s work–such as the limits of human agency, moral complexity, and encounters with alien intelligence–the project positions Eastern European thinkers as historically grounded yet indispensable for articulating the stakes of global technological shifts. Combining theoretical analysis and archival research with extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, the book traces how Lem’s predictions have taken concrete shape while also framing the existential implications of emerging technologies. Holding together the empirical and the speculative, it rethinks artificial intelligence beyond existing frameworks. As such, this book not only contributes to the recent turn toward global, non-Anglophone and non-Western histories of AI, but also develops new concepts.
Read The Gnostic Machine: AI in Lem’s Summa Technologiae. Read Existential Technologies. Read Exonet. Read Unlearning Habitual Cosmologies.