React and Respond. Image Cultures under Platform Capitalism

Conference Prof. Dr. Roland Meyer, DIZH Bridge Professor for Digital Cultures and Arts at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

Contemporary networked image cultures cannot be understood outside of platform capitalism. Today, the production, distribution and reception of networked visual media is largely facilitated, managed and controlled by the algorithmic infrastructures, corporate policies and business models of digital platforms. And at the heart of platform architectures is the quantification, evaluation and monetization of reactions – whatever we encounter online is designed to trigger our reactions, and our reaction patterns in turn drive the visual economies of platform capitalism. With algorithmically curated feeds and personalized content, what we get to see online and how we react to it is inextricably linked in ways we can often only speculate about.
Bringing together scholars and artists from a range of fields and backgrounds, the conference «React & Respond» aims to map and analyze these contemporary economies of networked image cultures and their aesthetic, ideological and political implications. In four panels, the conference will explore how the quantification of reactions shapes and regulates image production and platform aesthetics, how algorithmic infrastructures anticipate and model patterns of attention and affect, how a ubiquitous regime of testing and training is building a global system of distributed visual labor, asking finally for possible aesthetic and political responses that might evade, subvert or even overcome the imperatives of platform capitalism.

SAVE THE DATE – more information on program and location(s) soon to come.