Activating the Conspiracist Archive

Tracing, Layering, and Speculative Association

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37522/txz4kb65

Keywords:

conspiracy theories, drawing, memes, overlay, mapping

Abstract

The text describes the “Conspiracist Session”, a workshop method developed by the artists Adomas Žudys and Indrė Liškauskaitė that uses tracing, layering, and rearranging archival images to generate intuitive artistic research processes. Adomas’ archive consists of thousands of printed digital images related to conspiracy aesthetics, memes, politics, symbols, and internet culture, collected as a way to preserve and reinterpret unstable

online media. In the workshops, students trace overlapping images onto transparent vellum paper, creating unexpected visual and conceptual associations that encourage speculation, intuition, and non-linear thinking. The method draws on theories by Richard Hofstadter, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Fredric Jameson, and Aby Warburg, framing conspiracy aesthetics as a way to map hidden systems, generate meaning, and activate imagination rather than promote conspiracy beliefs. After the workshops, students began using their own phone galleries and digital archives as source material, revealing recurring themes such as cats, bodies, and digital culture while turning personal image collections into starting points for new artistic projects.

Author Biographies

  • Adomas Žudys , Vilnius Academy of Arts

    Adomas Žudys is an artist working at the intersection of digital and physical artifacts, his main interests are the crisis of imagination and conspiracy theories. The artistic practice that he is developing focuses on old and well known art forms collaged together with current technologies and worldviews. His subjects range between intimate space and time, personal and public experiences, identity and its representation, signs, magic, virtual and actual reality. Adomas is a lecturer and doctoral candidate at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

  • Indrė Liškauskaitė, Vilnius Academy of Arts

    Indrė Liškauskaitė is an interdisciplinary artist, lecturer, and doctoral candidate at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. With her non-human collaborators and companions, poodle Delta and border collie Delfina, she is researching how playing with a dog(s) can become an artistic practice as well as a method to create collaborative art pieces. Liškauskaitė has a background in painting and textile studies. She became an agility athlete with her two dogs after reading Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2007). Liškauskaitė ironically portrays the human and human behavior in order to take a deeper look into social, cultural, and philosophical constructions that shape the inter-species encounters.

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Published

2026-09-29

Issue

No. 3 (2026): Parodyk virtuvę / Show Me the Kitchen

Section

Articles