Goldsmiths College Department of Art MFA Lectures 2018 - 2019
Series 1.1: Offence is the Best Defence: On the Success of Social Media Toxicity
8 Oct 2018 — Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths): “We're trying to have the non-weird future get here as fast as possible.”
15 Oct 2018 — Isobelle Clarke (Birmingham): "Poor little snowflake, are you 'grossly' offended?": Quantifying Communicative Styles of Twitter Trolling
22 Oct 2018 — Zeena Feldman (Kings College, London): Beyond Time: On Quitting Social Media
29 Oct 2018 — William Davies (Goldsmiths): War of Words: Embodiment and Rhetoric in Online Combat
Daniel Rourke
8th October 2018
“We're trying to have the non-weird future get here as fast as possible.”
From the Latin ‘aequivocare’, for ‘called by the same name’, to equivocate is to use language ambiguously to conceal a truth or avoid commitment to a single meaning. In this talk Daniel Rourke will consider equivocation in the performative (social media) speech acts of figures such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
How their speech acts exposit a 'shared' future, or a means of ‘escaping’ our present conditions, has much to tell us about how the very idea of the ‘true’ or the ‘false’ has shifted in the era of algorithmic governance, and social media campaigns such as #MeToo.
Turning to Homi K. Bhabha's theories of postcolonial discourse, as well as introducing the project The 3D Additivist Manifesto – co-created with Morehshin Allahyari – Daniel will end by trying to reaffirm the equivocal act, pointing out a way to generate and move toward non-determinate futures without imperialising them.
BIO: Dr. Daniel Rourke is a writer/artist and co-convener of Digital Media (MA) at Goldsmiths. In his work Daniel creates collaborative frameworks and theoretical toolsets for exploring the intersection of digital materiality, the arts, and posthumanism. These frameworks often hinge on speculative elements taken from science fiction and pop culture: fictional figures and fabulations that might offer a glimpse of a radical ‘outside’ to the human(ities). His writing and artistic profile includes work with AND Festival, The V&A, FACT Liverpool, Arebyte gallery, Centre Pompidou, Transmediale, Tate Modern, Sonic Acts Festival, as well as recent artistic collaborations with a cast of hundreds... web: machinemachine.net.
Presented by the Art Department, Goldsmiths.
