This year’s RMeS Winter School (26-27 January 2023) will be organised by Tilburg University.
For the latest edition of the winter school we invite researchers to explore, analyse, and (above all) celebrate the frayed edges of digital media culture – glitches, blurred boundaries, major or minor transgressions – and the creative potential of these ostensibly neglected or problematic areas that lie outside the mainstream. How can these “trouble spots” be useful in conceptual, theoretical, or methodological terms? How do they reveal fundamental contradictions about our digital culture? How do they queer our virtual lives? Can we build something from their malfunction?
The glitch is an interruption of our daily digital lives. When a part of the technology breaks down and manifests as a glitch, it changes the way we read, interpret, and interact online. Glitches are an aesthetic of failure. When we are interpellated by failure, as Michael Betancourt points out, the “aura of the digital” is dispelled. What should be a prescribed course of action is stopped, and we are faced with a blank screen (buffering anxiety). Glitches blur our idealised encounters with the digital. They therefore question what we expect from the digital, and how what is supposedly immaterial can reveal its material basis.
Artists, activists, and scholars have long embraced the revolutionary and critical potential of the “glitch” (Menkman), the “poor image” (Steyerl), the “accident” (Virilio), the “non-place” (Augé), the “punctum” (Barthes), the “hauntological” (Fisher), the “trouble” (Haraway), contagion, decoherence, dissonance, negation, and so on. How can we push this even further, to open the cracks that exist in everything (because “that’s where the light gets in”)? Can we intrepret the glitch as a call to arms Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto?
Inspired by these glitches, blurrings, and transgressions, we look forward to two days of groundbreaking discussion on themes related to digital culture, including (but not limited to):
- Porous boundaries
- Fluid identities
- Failure
- Anxiety
- Glitching algorithms/machines
- Technological disobedience
- Remixing from within
- As form of (in)visibility
- As political strategy
- Encounters between the material and immaterial
The programme will feature keynote lectures by Rosa Menkman and Cecile Malaspina, a discussion group, and a workshop on research valorisation and fundraising schemes by THRIVE Institute on Research Valorisation and Fundraising Schemes.
When: 26 & 27 January 2023
Time: TBA
Where: Tilburg University
ECTS: 2 (two full days plus preparation 3 days)
Organized by: Dr Julian Hanna, Dr Inge van de Ven, Lucie Chateau, Dr Nathan Wildman and RMeS
Open to: PhD candidates who are a member of RMeS
Registration | Register before December 15, 2022
Image: self-portrait by Rosa Menkman