Ex-User Experience. Social Media Archiving Workshop

The archival gesture delves into the speculative zone where something alive has ceased to be. It examines if this gesture truly unfolds its effects: if that something stops being alive. Can we put an end to the usurpation of our social, emotional, and literacy energies by the platforms through the archiving of the vital work handed over to them? In a context of information overload, and faced with a scarcity of collective tools to oppose the intimate delegation of our time to the platforms, Ex-User Experience aims to seize the archival gesture as a necessary step for (a) the abandonment of the “user”’s social subjectivity and textual-affective practices and (b) an analysis of the necropolitics of social networks that achieves to distance itself from the civil and narcissistic principle of the individual profile. If archiving does not effectively annihilate an item, it necessarily repositions it: it generates a narrative from a fictional distance position. What has happened in the last 15 years, how much of what we have been has passed by digitally? How can we make what the cloud stores truly ours? What counts as data, what could count as text, item, or object? Can we understand ourselves, not just as individuals, but as an era through these materials?

Led by Paula Pérez-Roda as part of the IX Artistic Research Grant Fundació Banc Sabadell–Hangar, this workshop tackles the private and commodified materials derived from online life using an archaeological methodology. It is a theoretical-practical workshop where participants commit to the desire to generate an archive of native-digital materials based on the traces of their internet life, from which they can think collectively. We will review the different archiving policies allowed by various platforms, collect a repository of transmedia textual “data” from social networks, and explore what types of memory can be discarded and collected from them. The hypothesis is that, perhaps, among these lines, the sociopolitical “plugins” that turn citizens into user-bodies can be detected and dismantled.

Practical Information
Date: Wednesday, July 3, 2024
Time: 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM
Venue: Antigues oficines, Hangar
Language: Spanish, with the option to participate in Catalan and English
Pre-registration required here until June 27th

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