Guest lecture by dr. Olga Goriunova.

2012.10.29

Date	Wed 12 Dec
Time	09:30 — 11:30
Location	Aarhus University, building 1593

Aesthetic morphogenesis has been entrenched in digital forms. Today, something that primarily has an aesthetic sensibility exhibits the capacity to propel a political voice, an idea, social problem, or a conceptual figure, all online.

It’s not only that teenagers joke by creating memes and forwarding them around, but political protest employs the language of memes or viral cultural production.

The aim of this talk is to explore preposterous, weird, humorous and ‘silly’ creative production, and, specifically, memes, that circulate on the Web as indicative of something larger then they initially seem, as the performance of individuation and as objects of relationships that mediate individuation.

Following both Simondon and Bakhtin, I focus on digital aesthetic forms that not only entice but propel and mold individual, collective and technical becoming. Such aesthetics, however, not only performs through memes, but is open in its own way to an individuating process yielded by, in the case of memes, particular platforms with distinct human-technical mannerisms.

Memes are intimately linked to 4chan’s /b board, the birthplace of Lulzsec and the Anonymous hacking networks, which, in turn, inform the production of new human-technical assemblages. These complex intersections and Moebius strips of media ecologies emerging by employing each others’ histories, technical architectures and aesthetic work is a picture that the talk concludes with.

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