A lecture by Caroline Bassett

Just as the media become more about the ‘life’ than about the screen – something we experience everyday everywhere, something that saturates our worlds, a new movement in aesthetics says the new media is over. The new is old, the digital is no longer to be usefully distinguished from the analogue, and we should do something else, look at some other objects, perhaps, engage with nostalgia, the retro, the secondhand, the vintage.

This is the post-digital – and it makes a claim to account for contemporary, even to name it.  This talk looks at why the claims for the post digital are made, and made now. It asks why they resonate, gaining traction in debate and in everyday life and in cultural productions, and in the art world.  It explores possible connections between the post digital, which apparently turns away from technology and Object Orientated Ontologies which demand that we attend to the thing?

Finally I want to suggest that there are other ways to think about the present, or to seek to define the contemporary moment – and that these might have a different orientation towards the future.

Caroline Bassett is  Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Fellow at the University of Helsinki, and Professor of Media and Communications in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex, UK.  Her research explores media technologies and cultural forms and practices and has published widely on feminism and technology, technological imaginaries, and contemporary computational culture. At the moment she is finishing a book on Anti-Computing.

Thursday, October 9, from 17:00-19:00, Media Lab, Miestentie 3, Otaniemi, Room 429