My keynote at Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines in Bath next month will draw on material from a forthcoming book (working title) A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media (due with Polity Press, 2020). For those attending it needs to be read in conjunction with the other keynote Simon O’Sullivan’s work on fictioning. e.g. Mythopoesis or Fiction as Mode of Existence: Three Case Studies from Contemporary Art – https://www.simonosullivan.net/articles/Mythopoesis_or_Fiction_as_Mode_of_Existence.pdf
The below abstract should soon appear on the Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines symposium website alongside full details on the event. https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/digital-ecologies-ii/
I’ll also be taking a similar approach to the SSASS summer schools in Lancaster PA in late July with artist Mikey Georgeson whose Kemi Peckpo and the Deadends offer a comparable mixture of aesthetic, fiction machinics. The SSASS early bird registration has just been extended to mid June, so do take a look at the full line up.
Feeling Facts and Fakes in the Speculative Contagion of Shock Events
Abstract
Politics is caught in a moment when strategic Big Lies bring big rewards, experts are marked as untrustworthy and factuality acquiesces to so-called post-truthiness. So where is theory in all this? Indeed, at a time when political impasses are all the rage, we find theory has itself gone down a comparable conceptual cul-de-sac. Despite much conjecturing about post-truth, we find a forced distinction between facts that are either brutally rational or decoupled from reality. This talk will draw attention to different ways of grasping the experience of fact. It aims to rethink political fabrication through Whiteheadian aesthetics, micro-shocks, SEO strategies, information voids and speculative contagion. The aim is to bring together feelings and thinking, aesthetics and politics, and consider the perhaps awkward facts about a people yet-to-come, but already on their way.
VIRALITY 