Affect in the Digital Era | Seminar

Has the advent of the digital era created and imposed on us a very distinct way of experiencing emotion? Are we experiencing knowledge (its creation, acquisition, and processing); our own subjectivity (as thinking, sensate, corporeal subjectivity); our relationship with other individuals and groups; and art as spheres of aesthetic, political, and critical experience?

Have new media−some of them no longer all that new−developed their own ways of creating and transmitting affect? Are they responsible for our expanded capacity to create and transmit “sensations” and, thus, content? Or maybe it’s the other way around and new media are blocking channels and modes of communications we were using before the digital age?

Together with researchers and artists, we will look for answers to these and dozens of other questions during this three-hour-long seminar. As starting points for our discussions we will use our own experiences as authors (creators) and users of new media as well as the following readings, all of which are available online.

Suggested reading

Lev Manovich, What is New Media? from his book The Language of New Media

Vivian Sobchack, Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of This Century Alive (from the Anthropology of Visual Culture anthology)

Brian Massumi, “Like a Thought,” introduction to the anthology A Shock to Thought. Expression after Deleuze and Guattari

Jill Bennett, “Aesthetics of Intermediality”, Art History 30, no. 3 (2007): 432-450