A Machine as Complex as the World Itself
A first gathering towards Bergen Assembly 2028
11–12 September 2026
Korskirken, Bergen
With: James Bridle, Alice Bucknell, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcus Coates, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Simone Ghetti, Simone Kotva, Kei Kreutler, Lars Bang Larsen, Chiemi Shimada, Ellen Viste, Lua Vollaard, Mark Thomas Young
In September 2026, Bergen Assembly will take the first steps towards its 2028 edition. Convened by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos and conceived as a two-day gathering and an open research process, A Machine as Complex as the World Itself invites artists, musicians, scientists, storytellers, and local audiences to collectively shape the questions, concerns, and lines of inquiry that will guide the development of Bergen Assembly 2028. At the gathering’s heart, is a desire to approach technology as an ancestral and ongoing practice of world-making, extending far beyond the horizon of computation.
While acknowledging that technology has become synonymous with the digital, we return to its broader relationship with tools, techniques, and forms of practical knowledge. We approach technological capacity as widespread, interspecies, and irreducible to capitalist production. How do humans, animals, plants, spirits, and machines make and adapt worlds, share emotions, transmit knowledge, foresee change, and alter states of being? What becomes visible when these capacities are approached as technologies? Exhibitions, symposia, performances, rituals, songs, maps, and assemblies, can themselves be understood as technologies: ways of convening people, things, and ideas, and of making relationships perceptible.
Bergen itself is rich in the histories, practices, and forms of knowledge through which Bergen Assembly 2028 will develop. The city’s extensive legacy of cartography, maritime exchange, scientific collecting and geographical education connects Bergen to long traditions of seeing, mapping and producing spatial knowledge. Bergen’s place in the history of meteorology, particularly through the Bergen School of Meteorology and its legacy in climate science, inspires a reflection on the many techniques through which societies encounter uncertainty and seek access to what cannot be immediately known: forecasting, predicting, divination, modelling, weather lore, astronomy, and practices of transcendence. A Machine as Complex as the World Itself will also consider Bergen’s cultural and geographic relationships to oral transmission, song, storytelling, and the richness of Northern cosmologies, approaching memory as a technique through which knowledge is stored, performed, repeated, and reactivated.
Across these exchanges moves a transversal force: ecstasy, embraced as a state that interrupts the day-to-day operations of the self, exceeds usefulness, unsettles the organisation of productive life, and allows feeling and intelligence to meet in unexpected ways. Ecstasy appears without announcing itself: through music, ritual, hypnosis, movement, theory, and moments of shared observation. It offers a way of asking what knowledge may become when it is produced, felt, sung, moved, weathered, and transformed.
Participants span the arts, humanities, and sciences and include artist and writer James Bridle, whose recent publication, Ways of Being, connects computation to ecological complexity; artist Alice Bucknell, whose artistic practice includes videogame design and environmental damage; curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, whose recent research approaches the angelic and the agentic across art, technology and theological traditions; Marcus Coates, whose artistic language investigates ways of connecting with the natural environment in a post-natural world; artist Nolan Oswald Dennis who will take the audience through a listening exercise featuring sounds from the Earth and the sky; musician Simone Ghetti, whose work explores the intersection of harmony, dissonance and noise; theologian Simone Kotva, author of the recent book Ecologies of Ecstasy, on mystical contemplation and vegetal life; writer and researcher Kei Kreutler, whose work explores cultural narratives of technology; curator Lars Bang Larsen, whose reflections will address what ecstasy could mean today in the wake of psychedelic countercultures; artist Chiemi Shimada, whose short film mmm traces a history of clouds in Japanese cinema since the 1920s; climate scientist Ellen Viste, whose two recent books, Tales of the Wind and Temperature, combine narratives from science, history, and journeys through nature to help us understand the weather and the elements; curator and artist Lua Vollaard, whose lecture-performance will address the untold feminist histories of the microchip; and philosopher Mark Thomas Young, who discusses the making and unmaking of tools and objects from the perspective of maintenance and repair.
Taking place at Korskirken in Bergen over the course of an evening and a day, A Machine as Complex as the World Itself is open to all and free of charge. The gathering opens on the evening of 11 September. The programme continues throughout Saturday, 12 September, with conversations, performances, music, screenings, and collective forms of inquiry that will begin to shape the questions of Bergen Assembly 2028.
Friday, 11 September
17:00
Welcome drink at Bergen Assembly
Halfdan Kjerulfsgate 4
18:00–19:30
Film screening and live music including works by Nolan Oswald Dennis, Simone Ghetti, and Chiemi Shimada
Korskirken, Nedre Korskirkeallmenningen 20
Saturday, 12 September
11:00–19:00
Talks, performances, conversations, presentations and screenings by James Bridle, Alice Bucknell, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcus Coates, Simone Kotva, Kei Kreutler, Lars Bang Larsen, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, Ellen Viste, Lua Vollaard, Mark Thomas Young
Korskirken, Nedre Korskirkeallmenningen 20
Full time schedule will be available soon. Reserve your free spot HERE.
Image credit: Alice Bucknell, gameplay still from Earth Engine (2026), video game.