Terminally Online invites you to our inaugural symposium on FATIGUE and how it relates to new media technologies, cultures, and experiences.
🗓️ Date: May 13, 2024 (14:00 – 18:00)
📍 Location: Perdu Bookstore, Kloveniersburgwal 86, 1012 CZ Amsterdam
In many ways, it seems that fatigue has become the default disposition of the present - the defining character of our collective state of being. On one hand, fatigue can be framed as a totalizing, manufactured regime of management over the subject. On the other, it may act as a point of affective convergence, a shared undertone that fosters some semblance of 'togetherness'. Fatigue may be the one constant category we can grasp onto because everything else is moving too damn fast.
New media and fatigue appear to have a concrete relationship which manifests in manifold ways (e.g., doomscrolling, burnout, environmental exhaustion) and operates in different domains. AI hype, attention economy, platform labor, gigwork, online subcultures, and networked conspiracy, to name a few, raise questions about how fatigue is (re)produced, networked, and embodied at local and collective levels. How does fatigue shape emergent technology and the ways we grapple with it? Through these relations, how does fatigue contour our shared possibilities? And to what extent have promises of change or resolution themself become fatigued?
The concept of fatigue is an open question which hits different registers across sets and settings. If fatigue is our collective undertone, then this symposium attempts to surface its conditions, look it in the eyes, and examine its possibilities.
EVENT PROGRAM 📱 👀 📉 ⚡ ❌ 🥵
14:00 – 14:50 Keynote by Geert Lovink
➡️ Fatigue could be framed as one of many causes and expressions of techno-mental breakdown, from sadness, loneliness to anger, anxiety and burn-out. Remember Zoom fatigue? In this zombie state there is tiredness-without-reason. It is a never-ending fatigue. There’s this longing for physical exhaustion but we won’t get there. Like infinite scrolling, the endless stream of disasters provokes a desire for a resolute solution, but the escape button is impossible to find.
15:00 – 16:00 Weary/Wearisome Worlds, student presentations of original research by Ruben Hazenbos, Shiyun Quan & Qingyu Yang, Maanvi Khurana
➡️ Fatigue appears across a variety of encounters with new media technologies, from the precarious semiotics of the emoji, to aesthetic articulations of agency on Tumblr/TikTok, to the temporal distortion and existential impasse of ‘doomscrolling.’ These presentations offer three illustrations of how Fatigue is thoroughly immanent to new media in late-capitalism so that it comes to mark our communities of practice, online subcultures, and networked dispositions.
16:10 – 17:00 Fatigue squared (i’m sick and tired of being sick and tired), a roundtable with Misha Kavka, Lucia Bainotti, Jernej Markelj, and Marc Tuters (UvA faculty)
➡️ Our conversation will kick-off by exploring the figuration of fatigue (how can we conceptualise fatigue?). Second, we will dive into the production of fatigue (e.g. is fatigue manufactured? who does it serve? what are the material conditions that produce it?). The panel will culminate in a collective reflection on the political potential of fatigue (e.g. can there be productive engagement with fatigue? how to move with fatigue? how can fatigue be employed as a mode of critique?).
17:00 – 18:00 Borrel!
The event segments include Q&A's, and we invite the audience to join us in teasing out fatigue and its relationship with all things new media.
⬇️ 💌 Confirm your participation (free) by filling in the information below!
