In “Please Compile Carefully,” curator Mika Ben Amar explores software as a site of intimate craft for TICK TACK’s cinema program. Every night, Chia Amisola’s browser interventions and Sabato Visconti’s videogame hacks screen outside the Antwerp gallery’s exhibition space (and on its website). “Through acts of performance and rewriting, the works emphasize the human gestures, decisions, and labor embedded within computational systems,” writes Ben Amar.

nGbK Berlin’s “EastUnBloc” examines the permeability of the “Iron Curtain” through the lens of experimental media art by more than two dozen artists and collectives from socialist and transition-era Central and Eastern Europe. From Slovak homebrew computer games, to Igor Štromajer’s hardware hacks, to the set of Hungary’s guerilla Vákuum TV: the included pieces counter clichés of socialist conformity and reveal the many inventive strategies—“scripts”—of making do.

“This isn’t just about preserving old games—it’s about preserving the story of computing itself,” writes software engineer Juan Manuel Mendez Rey in an article documenting his 20-year quest to relicense Conquer (1987), a pioneering multiplayer strategy game distributed across Usenet in five separate files. Tracking down the fragmented code and obtaining permission from the surviving developers, Rey secured GPL licensing and released the revived game on GitHub.

Valve’s most recent Counter-Strike 2 update triggers a $2 billion market collapse by making it possible to build ultra-rare knife and glove cosmetics from cheap materials. The change democratized access to items that sell for thousands of dollars, crashing knife prices by up to 70%. Data scientist Nokkvi Dan Ellidason, framing the crash for Cointelegraph, says it reveals the fatal flaw in platform-controlled videogame economies: “It’s not a true economy; it’s a company store.”

Artist and researcher Sam Stewart traces the American Valkist Party, a faction within Roblox’s simulated nUSA that adapted its ideology from a WW2 grand strategy videogame mod, arguing that through virtual world-building the group radicalized from cultural nationalism toward fascism. The case study raises questions about how gaming platforms enable fringe political experimentation to harden into extremism among Gen Z—and the blurry lines between ironic performance and sincere belief.

In “Persistent Worlds,” Alice Bucknell’s first major museum exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha (CZ), the LA-based artist and writer presents four recent works—two films, two videogames—that explore speculative fiction, eco-criticism, and interspecies collaboration through simulation. Small Void (2025), Staring at the Sun (2024-25), Nightcrawlers (2025), and The Alluvials (2023) unsettle reality, curator Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás writes, reminding us that worldbuilding is a powerful political gesture.

Poet Nora Claire Miller writes about buying Laurie Anderson’s 1995 CD-ROM, Puppet Motel, along with a vintage laptop, and taking both to the acclaimed musician and artist’s Lower Manhattan studio for a spin. “Originally, this was going to be a set-building project about a tour that I was doing. So I thought, let’s do a virtual show first,” Anderson reveals about her foray into multimedia. Fans didn’t bite. “People want a t-shirt. They don’t want to see me roam.”

“Suzanne Treister: Prophetic Dreaming” at Modern Art Oxford (UK) traces the British para-disciplinary artist’s enduring fascination with new technologies, power structures, and alternative belief systems. Treister’s first major institutional retrospective spans four decades and includes key works like the HEXEN 2.0 series of alchemical diagrams of big picture histories, with the latest, HEXEN 5.0 (2023-25), linking AI, climate breakdown, and quantum computing.