US new media artist Ben Grosser and I met at the 2013 Unlike Us #3 Institute of Network Cultures event in Amsterdam where he presented his Demetricator, a free web browser extension that hides all the metrics on Facebook. I have followed his work ever since. We got in contact again in 2019 when he premiered his video art clip Order of Magnitude.[1] The cut-up piece features Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with growth. Instead of taking the traditional critical approach, Ben Grosser magnifies particular words that return in each and every one of his sentences: more, millions, billions, trillions. Covering the earliest days of Facebook in 2004 up through Zuckerberg’s compelled appearances before the US Congress in 2018, Grosser viewed every one of these recordings and used them to build a supercut drawn from three of Mark’s most favoured words: more, grow, and his every utterance of a metric such as two million or one billion. Inside the exploding galaxy of Facebook there are no limits of growth. After a few minutes the viewer gets exhausted and is ready to swipe the video away, stand up and walk out: the exact opposite response to what we experience when we’re on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. The emptiness of the guy suffocates. Well done, Ben.
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Postdisciplinarity makes claims on ontological, epistemic, and methodological levels, but it is inevitably a personal philosophical stance. This article represents an existentialist approach to the discourse on postdisciplinarity, offering reflective narratives of three academics. Tomas Pernecky discusses creativity, criticality, freedom, and methodological and epistemic pluralism; Ana María Munar reveals her journey of epistemological awakening; and Brian Wheeller underscores the importance of researchers' subjective and emotive voice. Jointly, the authors depict postdisciplinarity as an invitation to conceptual and interpretive eclecticism, critical analysis, and creative problem solving.
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The Hungarian artist Judit Kis was one of the artists who gave a performance during Video Vortex #12 in Malta, in September 2019. This is where I was introduced to her very personal work. In the following months I engaged with her work and decided to approach her for an (email) interview. In an artistic sense, Judit Kis fits well into the ‘intermedia’ category. She produces videos (https://vimeo.com/user9166179), photo documentations (here her older Tumblr site), prints, paintings, ceramics, performances and installations consisting of blankets, lightboxes and bricks. She prints sentences on textile and engraves words into ceramic bricks (all in English). Titles of some of her video works: I have never happened, Detoxification, Dedication, Disillusion, Distance, I love you, and a confronting one: Enough.
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