FRI 7. KL1000- KEYNOTE-PROF MIKE WATSON

Professor Mike Watson (UK) (PhD Goldsmiths College) is a theorist, critic and curator who is principally focused on the relation between art, new media and politics. He has written for Art Review, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic and Radical Philosophy and has curated events at the 55 and 56th Venice Biennale, and Manifesta 12. He is currently working on a second book for ZerO Books, provisionally entitled This is so Contemporary: 21st Century Aesthetics.
 

Seminar Day 1
Friday 7th September, Tou Scene
10·10–10·40 Keeping On: There is no alternative, let’s look for one
Keynote speech by Professor Mike Watson, John Cabot University 

Professor Mike Watson argues that the abstraction of the social whole, led by the fragmented, disorienting and breakneck nature of digital media needs to be engaged in head-on such that a new order may emerge from the conflicting messages generated by memes, live streaming, video gaming, social media and IM. To some extent this seems to already be happening, as one can see in the output of Indie games such as ‘There is a Genie in my Szechuan sauce’, or in the YouTube series ‘Don’t Hug me I’m Scared’, which engage with the nihilistic uncertainty of our times. In this sense the millennial generation might be described as Adornian, in that rather than seek sense, they hope that the abstraction of creative endeavor, might throw into question the abstraction of the social whole. Adorno taught us that in a society without meaning or scruples, art had become almost impossible, but that we should carry on making it regardless. Adorno likely would have been highly critical of millennial culture, yet such a path may be the only antidote to the intensely held feeling that ‘there is no alternative’.

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