"From Forever More to Degrowth Aesthetics: Tactics of Bounding in the Digital Infinite". The talk by Ben Grosser is now online
Ben Grosser gave this great talk introducing his work when he was guest professor at DARC and AU in the autumn of 2023. The talk (re)frames his art practice and artworks as establishing and encacting an aesthetics of degrowth. He examines the growth aesthetics in today's big tech platforms, showing how their designs reshape our conceptions of life as limitless in order to convert our time and attention into endless profit. Then he walks us through a series of his projects that counter, subvert, and reimagine this digital landscape, discussing how net art makes possible a 'tactics of bounding' that helps us recover a sense of finitude in the face of the digital infinite.
From Forever More to Degrowth Aesthetics: Tactics of Bounding in the Digital Infinite
17 November 2023
Aarhus University, Denmark
Original abstract:
Despite their lofty mission statements, today’s leading social media platforms primarily emphasize one singular concept: more . These capitalist software machines are designed to stoke an insatiable cycle of production and consumption in order to maximize corporate growth and profit. To achieve this, they leverage data and scale to produce signals and interface patterns that keep users engaged, promising connection and joy in exchange for growing shares of our time and attention. This talk presents a series of art projects that resist these accumulative logics, works that employ an aesthetics of degrowth that reconfigures and/or reimagines the social apps that aim to trap us in endless loops—until there’s no more time left to give.
See Ben Grosser's presentation here: https://bengrosser.com/blog/talk-on-degrowth-aesthetics-at-aarhus-university/