A Pandemic Crisis Seen from the Screen: Digital art and electronic literature as reflection on pandemic platform culture.
17. Dezember 2021, 18.00 Uhr ONLINE on Gather Town
Interface Cultures lädt im Rahmen des Sankt Interface Day 2021 zur Keynote von Søren Pold.
Streaming Link: Gather.town
How to understand what the pandemic has done to social and cultural life? As pointed out by Astrid Erll, Covid-10 is the first global pandemic of the digital age and even though the Spanish Flu pandemic (1918-19) has been somewhat forgotten and hardly has left any public monuments, partly due to its lack of narrative dimensions, Covid-19 has left a huge archive online on news sites and social media.
Digital art and electronic literature have since their beginnings explored new and alternative modes of narrativity and visuality. Exploring the aesthetics of digital art related to the pandemic is relevant in order to discuss how to understand, process and cope with it. Digital art reflects by virtue of its artistic medium of expression on the life at and behind the screen, including how we are increasingly governed by interfaces, corporate platforms and software. The pandemic crisis has been a climax in the age of corporate platform culture from video conferencing to streaming platforms and social media.
Søren Pold is a researcher in digital aesthetics and teacher at Digital Design, Aarhus University. He has published on various topics and genres within digital and media aesthetics with a focus on interface criticism, including electronic literature, net art, software art, urban and mobile interfaces and controlled consumption.
