Zoekresultaten

State of the art

Elevating the Antagonist Encounter

Working as speech acts that delineate online communities, claims to victimhood tend to evoke contestation. Their inherent political nature spurs user engagement in the shape of clicks, shares, emojis, and so on. TikTok’s multimodality has given rise to new practices of engagement that significantly shape how victimhood is communicated and negotiated. This study draws attention to the platform vernacular practice of the ‘stitch.’ Allowing users to respond to someone else by ‘remixing’ social media content of others, the stitch is a platform practice designed for commentary. We zoom in on stitched videos networked by hashtags, published in relation to the Israel-Hamas war. TikTok’s multimodality expands user pathways that connect claimants and those who contest them. Moving beyond hashtag hijacking the stitch elevates a practice of commentary that turns victimhood politics into a spectacle that politicizes formerly less political realms, and that further blurs the boundaries between on- and offline spaces. The analysis shows how stitched videos are especially used for antagonist encounters where they crowd out the ‘original’ post to which they respond. In this way, stitches can be seen as tools that aid platformed ‘regimes’ of visibility that prioritize the antagonist encounter in order to commodify them.

The art of criticism

The Art of Criticism: A European Network for Experiments in Art CriticismTogether with partners from the field of art criticism, the Institute of Network Cultures has set up the project The Art of Criticism: a platform for research, experiments and policy making in the field of art criticism. Solid ground for reflection on art and culture in both niche and mainstream media is necessary for sound democratic societies, but financial and political developments across Europe have led to an increasingly unstable culture of critique. The project is aimed at strengthening such a culture of critique through facilitating and stimulating experiments in art criticism with the use of digital technology, and bringing together partners from many different European countries.

Van meme tot mainstream

De titel van het boek Van meme tot mainstream: internetkunst, esthetiek en offline luxe in een postdigitale wereld, verwijst naar een van de meest karakteristieke eigenschappen van onze tijd: de kracht van het internet die ervoor zorgt dat iets in een fractie van een seconde de wereld over kan gaan en alle aandacht op zich weet te vestigen, om vervolgens net zo snel weer te verdwijnen in het digitale universum. Deze viraliteit is een eigenschap die onze huidige westerse samenleving, kunst en cultuur sterk beïnvloedt. Van internetkunst post-internet, het onderzoeksproject The New Aesthetic, tot de laatste ‘offline als luxe’-trend. In Van meme tot mainstreamneemt Nadine Roestenburg je mee in haar gedachten, verbazing, fascinaties en ontdekkingen die voortkomen uit persoonlijke ervaringen, observaties en onderzoek. Volgens haar kunnen kunstenaars die zich bezighouden met (de impact van) het internet en digitale technologie ons nieuwe inzichten geven. De kunstenaars die worden besproken in Van meme tot mainstreamzoeken de grenzen op van de technologie, proberen de technologie te doorgronden of af te breken, om haar vervolgens op een andere manier weer in elkaar te zetten. Zij reflecteren op fenomenen waar we bewust, of onbewust, allemaal mee te maken hebben. Zij kunnen ons anders naar de wereld laten kijken. Nu de digitale revolutie voorbij is, is het tijd om terug te kijken op de veranderingen van de afgelopen jaren. En ruimte te creëren voor reflectie, waarin we kunnen beoordelen hoe we met onze technologieën om willen gaan en bedenken hoe we willen dat de technologieën er in de toekomst uit zullen zien.

The new aesthetic and art

The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital is an interdisciplinary analysis focusing on new digital phenomena at the intersections of theory and contemporary art. Asserting the unique character of New Aesthetic objects, Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha trace the origins of the New Aesthetic in visual arts, design, and software, find its presence resonating in various kinds of digital imagery, and track its agency in everyday effects of the intertwined physical world and the digital realm. Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha bring to light an original perspective that identifies an autonomous quality in common digital objects and examples of art that are increasingly an important influence for today’s culture and society.Influenced by a diverse range of figures, ranging from Vilém Flusser, Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, David Berry, Lev Manovich, Olga Goriunova, Ernst Mayr, Bruce Sterling and, of course, James Bridle, The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital doesn’t just propose a description of a new set of objects but radically asserts that New Aesthetic objects analogously function as organisms within a broader digital-physical ecosystems of things and agents.

Postdigital publishing

Although digital technologies promised a renaissance in the publishing industries, publishers still struggle with digital innovations and try to hold on to traditional workflows, production, form and business models. How can we open-up this top-down mode of communication? In this episode we discuss the future of (digital) publishing through interviews with Janneke Adema, Michael Dieter, Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke. How to approach the act of publishing (digital) in the postdigital age? What happens when we approach the book as an apparatus and what does that mean for the book as we know it? What does is mean for the notion of the author and the reader when we perform the book differently?