"The Coming Catastrophe": Olga Goriunova on "The Intractable and the Untracted"

The coming catastrophe poses a challenge to thinking. Only recently have the interrelated events of human-induced climate change and mass extinction begun to unfold as a global media event of proportional magnitude. The proliferation of discourses around impending anthropogenic doom seems to have reached a virtualtipping point, from which there is no return to a “business as usual”-attitude. As the environmental conditions on which all human life depends change in ever more alarming rates, there seem to be few aspects of life, of policy making, and of theoretical work, that can remain unchanged. Scholars in the field of cultural and media theory, particularly in Weimar, are used to observing phenomena of change in terms of their historical becoming. While the identification of the historical causes (and causers) of anthropogenic change is decisive for the assessment of “what there is to be done”, the current situation is unique in that it also challenges habitual modes of thinking and forces us to train our eyes on the things to come.

As a part of this semesters "Bauhaus.Module", the lecture series "The Coming Catastrophe" invites everyone to Olga Goriunova's upcoming lecture titled "The Intractable and the Untracted".

Olga Goriunova is a scholar and curator in the fields of digital media arts and cultures. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Media Arts Department, Royal Holloway, University of London. She graduated in philology from the Moscow State University (1999). She completed her Ph.D. on "Art Platforms. The constitution of cultural and artistic currents on the Internet" in Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki, on the concept of art platforms, with close attention to the questions of organizational aesthetics, autocreativity, collective, flexible and amateur production, network politics and valorization as playing out in the materiality of digital cultures. She taught audiovisual arts, sociology of art and media theory in Moscow City University and Moscow State University of Humanities; in many educational media institutions in St. Petersburg (course on the history of media technologies and essentials of media theory "Media: history of expansion", 2000-2001 Pro Arte Institute); Almaty/Kazakhstan ("New Media Art Strategies" Programme, 2001 Center for
Contemporary Art); Moldova and has lectured world-wide. Research interests include digital folklore, aesthetics of glitch, FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) and culture, online participatory platforms, 8-bit music and low tech aesthetics, sociology of artistic experiment and "male" literature, amongst others.

Topic: "The Intractable and the Untracted"
Date: 14th January 2020
Time: 19:00-20:30 Uhr
Location: R 015, Bauhausstraße 11