I am proud to announce that I will be one of the keynote speakers in the UNCERTAIN SPACES programme: “Corrupted Memories: aesthetics of ruins and digital museums”. Friday, October 31, 5 p.m., at the Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon, Portugal).
Glitched Landscapes, Giselle Beiguelman, 2013.
Here is the abstract of my lecture:
This lecture addresses some specific characteristics of contemporary media culture and their relations with artistic practices that discuss memory issues in the digital realm. I will focus on the aesthetics of noise, code corruption and appropriation of disposable technologies. My aim is to interrogate the ways in which this kind of aesthetics dialogues with fragmented spaces, urban fractures and programmed obsolescence. Based on art works by myself and other artists (such as Lucas Bambozzi and Ernesto Oroza), I suggest that glitch, recyclism, technological disobedience and other similar movements/genres point to critical views of contemporary culture and memory. Instead of celebrating a progressive, stable future, their peculiar “ruinology” allows us to deal with the social and emotional perception of loss, without betting on an imminent process of disappearance and programmed obsolescence. Therefore, the 21st century’s aesthetic of ruins constitutes a fertile terrain for the proposition of new parameters for archive and museum systems in the digital age.