Moderator: Denise Thwaites
Melinda Rackam – The Tawdry Nostalgia for Past Forms
I didn’t care about the legacy of -empyre- global media arts list founded in 2002 as part of my PhD in Virtual Worlds. Then, after 22 years of robust dialogues between many hundreds of guests and thousands of members, books, in-person meet ups and exhibitions including Documenta 12, it went silent. A cybersecurity sweep of the servers at UNSW Art & Design had disappeared it and they weren’t talking (to me). My simultaneous umbrage and tawdry nostalgia for the lost -empyre- has generated an internal debate on list death as an urgent loss to research culture necessitating reconstruction, or a prompt to forget it and move on?
Geert Lovink – From Sad by Design to Platform Brutalism
Brutalism is the title of Achille Mbembe’s 2020 book. Known as the 1950s rough-concrete architecture style, Mbembe presents the concept as a ‘thought image’ that can be seen as a not-so elegant synonym for the economic laws associated with the term capitalism in which the emphasis shifts from profit to violence. Mbembe explains: “Brutalism is the name given to this gigantic process of eviction and evacuation as well as to the draining of vessels and emptying of organic substances.” This results in naturalizing social war, a development many see unfolding since Covid and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In this lecture I will map my own trajectory, from Zoom fatique and the use of memes as copium to the weaponization of social media today. Once we’re stuck on the platform long enough, will the mood inevitably turn violent?
This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_GeertLovink.pptx