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Art Politics Poeticsmagma.screen is a digital platform for visual and written work that aims to critically intersect art, politics and poetics. The project brings together different forms of visual work and texts including creative writing, poetry, fiction and non-fiction, interviews and essays.
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We focus on the topic Love Memetics in a period when social life is under a halt and self-isolation finds its creative outlet in consuming and producing online creative content. The topic will be approached through the areas of feminism, post-colonial critique, psychoanalysis and the significance of art labour.
In the first cycle of Love Memetics six online residents, including artists and writers, will collaborate on a series of projects on the topic. The new work developed will be shown on the online.commissions section of magma.screen.
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What cultural role do memes serve at the moment?
Why does memetics feel so relevant today? Is memetics a tool for understanding Love or a symptom of a cynical neoliberalism? The current global health crisis has been met with radical state policies, theories such as herd immunity and has generally shaped the public debate as “Economy & Productivity versus Health & Safety”. The upcoming economic crisis will raise questions of concrete political and humanitarian solidarity beyond borders. “Love” as seen in empathy, care, communication, isolation, physicality and intimacy comes to the epicentre. How is Love shaped in the post-cynical age? |
We would like to dissect Love Mimetics into three thematic categories:
The politics of memesis; we are thinking of memesis in the context of new group identifications, affection invested in political figures in a climate of political cynicism, the reshaping of identity politics, the (re)turn to conservatism, the rise of the alt-right in the west. Memetics and digital cultures; we look at the growth of political movements in the digital sphere, the social impact of memes, the memetic warfare, the political influence of platforms such as 4chan or breitbart, the political accountability of social media platforms such as facebook, twitter etc. We investigate their repercussions on art, as seen in the recurrence of futuristic dystopian themes and influential practices such as LARP. Memesis: poetics as an answer; we consider the limits of the utilitarian value of cultural production beyond quantifiable ends. We discuss poetics as another type of desiring and enjoying, in terms of Love, intimacy, affection, failure, the abject, the lack of meaning. |
