Join us on Wednesday 5 February for the lecture Sad by Design: Notes on the Networked Psyche with media theorist Geert Lovink.
Lecture Sad by Design: Notes on the Networked Psyche
Wednesday 5 February 2020, 16.00 – 18.00
Master Institute of Visual Cultures, Parallelweg 21-23, ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Entrance is free.
Drinks afterwards
In this lecture Geert Lovink, Dutch media theorist, internet critic and founder of the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences will discuss the dark side of the net. The mental state of internet users is tragic. Instead of empowerment and self-organisation, what we mostly see around is anger and despair. How did we end up like this?
The presentation, which builds on the book Sad by Design (2019) that came out in five languages, zooms in on the widespread techno-sadness that is produced by dominant social media platforms through ‘behavioral modification’ (also known as ‘nudging’) with the aim to keep users coming back to the app, exposing them to even more personalized adds. Instead of empowerment and diversity we witness a ‘chilling effect’ of hyper conformism. How can we dismantle these ‘prediction markets’? Does Europe have anything on offer when it comes to alternatives or do we limit our role to regulation?
Biography Geert Lovink
Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019).
In 2004 Lovink founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. This centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing and the future of art criticism.
Lecture series
The Performative Defiance Lecture Series is an initiative of the Autonomy Research Chair at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt), organized in collaboration with and hosted by the Master Institute of Visual Cultures. Its aim is to provide within Avans University an open, public forum where some of the foremost national and international voices challenge us to think about and discuss the role of art and design for the creation of a different future, to imagine another kind of world, the kind of world we wish to live in.
The notion performative defiance refers to creative practices that depart from the idea of the future as a mere update of the present and calls for a recharge of aesthetic practice that turns complicity into defiance. What is required of art and design is an aesthetic mobilization to unsettle and then create the conditions that will ensure our survival and enhance our capacity to create and resist in the future. Performative defiance is therefore an articulation of a creative longing for a desirable future that lends itself to a counter position set against the deadlock of the present and against the symbolic misery of our time.
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Watch previous lectures online
The lecture by Geert Lovink is the fourth public lecture in the Performative Defiance Lecture Series. The previous lectures can be viewd on the Youtube Channel of the Master Institute of Visual Cultures.
#1 Brian Holmes, After Chimerica: Art and Bioregionalism in the Anthropocene
#2 Justin O’Connor, Creative Industries in China: From Catch-Up to Cold War 2.0
#3 Patricia Reed, Xenofeminism and Planetary Orientation
