An interstice is a small space between objects set closely together: between the cords in a rope, or atoms in a crystal lattice. It is an emptiness, as the necessary gap produced by the structure of which it is a part, and without which the structure could not be what it is. An interstice is also an interval of time, an opening between moments of orderly actions. And so we begin in the gaps between nodes and edges, between lattice and basis, in holes and voids. We start with this word and its definition because it names something physical before it names anything metaphorical. In crystallography, a crystal is defined by two things: a lattice and a base; the crystal structure emerges from their combination. What such arrangements of atoms also produce are interstitial sites: spaces that this combination generates but does not fill. Such sites have different types and different significance but it is there where matter does its most interesting work. Interstitial diffusion, the movement of small atoms through the gaps of a host lattice, is the mechanism by which materials transform.

What are the equivalent sites in social, cultural, and computational structures? Where are the gaps that these combinations generate but do not fill? What moves through them? And do they carry transformative power? Yancey Stickler's dark forest theory of the internet⁠1 describes the withdrawal of meaningful exchanges from the open and surveilled web into private channels that are not indexed. The dark forest metaphor originates in Liu Cixin's science fiction trilogy Rememberance of Earth's Past, where silence is a survival strategy in a universe of unknown and potentially hostile intelligences. The Dark Forest Collective's anthology⁠2 that gathers writing published online between 2019 and 2024, describes a retreat from spaces of continuous extraction into a broader ecology. There, a 'cozyweb' of small, sheltered spaces offers respite from aggressivenes of the public net. This and the 'dark nets,' 'miniverses', 'moving castles' are those interstitial spaces created within and below the dominant structures of the web, produced by them and defined against them. They are, however, not places of hiding but of a different kind of habitation.

The dark forest metaphor in Bogna Konior's work⁠3 extends beyond the internet and its extractive spaces all the way into the cosmos and back, to account for the opacity and unknowability of AI systems. Rather than a theory of social retreat from the internet, for Konior, the dark forest is increasingly inhabited by other-than-human intelligences that opt for non-engagement with people. This silence is not the absence but refusal. Just like net art started exploring the potential of new aesthetics, cultures and politics in the net 30 years ago, artists currently explore ways to alienate data infrastructures and GenAI. Whereas big tech aims for efficiency in an automation of human perception, cognition, identification and aesthetics ending at different kinds of naïve realism, artists and researchers explore the non/more-than human, glitchy, noisy, machinic, datafied, dark aesthetics to develop new expression, art forms and critiques of current data-ism and what is marketed as artificial intelligence. This includes exploring the dangers, threats and potentials in the interstices within badly curated data models, between polluting data centers and in the use of skeumorphic interfaces.

Interstices: Research (in) the gaps invites artists, researchers, and practitioners to submit proposals for the DARC PhD/Research Workshop. We are interested in works that occupy and move through the gaps that are social, as well as structural, ontological, and material, and that run through the fabric of matter, meaning and making itself. If the dark forest names the sociological phenomenon, and if it constructs an environment for another kind of communication, it also runs on an infrastructure of servers, cables, energy, and protocols, that is never neutral and never free. The gaps are not only social but also physical: the heat of data centers and their thirst for water, the latency in the cables, the unindexed nodes. We invite speculations, practical interventions, and inferences that fill the gaps, and expand the diversity of possible communications and communities that can inhabit dark forests, including those built on, against, and beneath the infrastructures that underlie them. With this theme we both look for work that explores the (dis-)continuous (end of) histories in technological explorations of computational infrastructures within the last 30 years (or longer) and how current artistic, theoretical and technical explorations of technological developments repeat or break from this.

The DARC workshop is led by scholars from the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at Aarhus University. For queries, contact Pablo Velasco pvelasco[at]cc.au.dk.