- Talks
The Tightest Mesh
Seminar: The Tightest Mesh
The Tightest Mesh is an afternoon seminar on the nature of the manufacturing and
instrumentalization of intimacies in digital space. It sets out to investigate what happens when online intimacies are redefined as spatial relations, with contributions from Bogna Konior and artist and writer Anna Engelhardt, who will present new work around notions of technologies of intimacy, digital topologies and cyberwar. The seminar spans performance, video and lecture formats and is organized by Mandus Ridefelt and Nellie Lindquist together with FORUM from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts: https://www.forumarchive.site/
PROGRAM
Part 1
14:30
Introduction: The Tightest Mesh, presentation by Mandus Ridefelt & Nellie Lindquist
Unlike historical media technologies such as the cinema or the loudspeakers, online interfaces are designed for one person and one set of eyes only. Intimacy resists scaling, yet it is what fuels these ubiquitous large-scale systems of online sociality. In the tension of this paradox, can we undo the weaponization of digital intimacy, by defining it as a spatial relation?
Part 2
15:00
Bogna Konior: ‘The Dark Forest’ (Screening) + ‘Exonet’
Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media Arts department at NYU Shanghai. After a screening of ‘The Dark Forest’ she will do a presentation via zoom on her work-in-progress ‘Exonet’, a book about the internet as an existential, deterministic technology, informed by her research into posthumanist theories of new media and genealogies and possible futures of cyberculture across Eastern Europe and East Asia.
BREAK
Part 3
17:00
Anna Engelhardt: Electronic Terraforming: how to unfold cyberwar (Performance-Lecture + Q & A)
Anna Engelhardt is the alias of a research-based media artist and writer. Her performance will treat the web as a sticky matter, showing space as a weapon of capture in cyberwar. Enacting the topology of a cyber domain, her work-in-progress invites a user to sneak into the folds of cyber territories, warped and fictionalised by cyberwarfare. Engelhardt theorises these violent disturbances in space as a powerful military capability that she calls ‘electronic terraforming’, used in the Russian invasion of Ukraine through electronic guns, fake cellular towers, and GPS jammers.
BIOS
BOGNA KONIOR
Bogna Konior is Assistant Professor at the Interactive Media Arts department at NYU Shanghai, where she teaches classes on emerging technologies, philosophy, humanities and the arts. She is currently working on two books, one about the internet as an existential technology, and the other about cyberfeminism, mysticism and emerging technologies of intimacy and reproduction. She has presented her work internationally, including at the University of Cambridge, the New School in New York, the Goethe Institute, e-flux, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
ANNA ENGELHARDT
Anna Engelhardt is the alias of a research-based media artist and writer. She examines
infrastructures of post-Soviet cyberspace through a decolonial lens, with an overarching aim of dismantling Russian imperialism. Pursuing writing, lecturing, and publishing to promote decolonial approaches to cyberspace and to situate digital conflicts within a broader colonial enterprise, her work has been featured at transmediale 2022, Venice Biennale Architettura 2021, Strelka Magazine, and Kyiv Biennial 2021.
MANDUS RIDEFELT
Mandus Ridefelt is a researcher and writer. His work deals with the construction of functional aesthetic objects across art, science, popular music and propaganda.
NELLIE LINDQUIST
Nellie Lindquist is a MFA student at the School for Media Arts at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Most recently she has co-curated SCREENINGS, a series of lectures and film screenings on digital intimacies.
FORUM
Forum is founded and run by students since 2016 at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts to make available situations for learning and sharing practices. https://www.forumarchive.site/ @forum_charlottenborg