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interesting-practice

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from: Conference Introduction by Geert Lovink and Lecture by Joana Moll (report)

After setting the stage with this articulation of the data political economy, Joana presented her web-based instalation, Carbolytics. Made in collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Carbolytics measures the carbon impact of tracking cookies in the top 1 million websites. The carbon footprint of online advertising is 60 million metric points (the equivalent to 60 million flights between London and New York). This represents 10% of the total energy used by the internet. However, these are all estimates, since there’s no proper agreement on how to calculate the energy consumption of the internet. interesting-practice
from: From Tactics to Strategies (report)

Can we learn from the squatting movement, when it comes to network activism and spreading the practices? Lukas tries to make a connection between the squatting movement and the hacker culture, historically present in the Netherlands. “‘Cracking’ was used for ‘hacking’”, he recalls. Could we engage digitally in “temporary autonomous zones”? We can also learn from feminist theory: that is, as to “space run from a community that has enough motives to take care of it”. Instead of seeing this caring time as a lost time, we should start seeing it as an essential time for community-making.interesting-practice
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

When Tina mentions the trending song that emerged on the app during the early days of confinement #boredinthehouse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBsPE6yHH9c), the audience laughs in recognition. Trends such as Bored in the House, where creators lip sync along to the Curtis Roach song, gave us a glimpse into the ways the confinement would inspire users to share in and combat a collective boredom using TikTok. mood interesting-practice
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

User tactics were appropriated back into platform strategies and further reinforced tiktok as a machine for converting home confinement into the joys of ambient play. Tina shares that something as simple as choosing more interesting backgrounds for zoom calls was a tactic for this conversion of confinement into ambient play. While an isolated home took on a series of new residences, while it began to symbolise a restricting enclosure, the feeling of being observed (on zoom) and entrapped, the act of staying home and the home itself began to represent the performance of our civic duty, protecting ourselves and others. interesting-practice
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Tina references the work of Ian Bogost who wrote the book Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/how-to-use-fun-to-find-meaning-in-life/499805/). She quotes him, saying: quote"Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something, even stupid, seemingly boring activities. It’s a foolish attention, even. An infatuation." interesting-practice
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

At the start of the pandemic TikTok created the #HappyAtHome campaign in an effort to contribute to the global stay at home effort (https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/staying-happyathome-with-tiktok) which incorporated livestream elements. interesting-practice The platform benefited immensely from the global need to stay home and combat boredom. It relies on the bored body as a basic requirement of its model as well as domesticity as a condition of being bored in the house. The condition of being bored in the house can also be recognized as chronic to digital culture. As a result reflectionplatforms like TikTok embody both the potential for tactical reinvention of the home and confinement as well as digital capitalism and control.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

She begins by sharing the definition of a subculture in the context of her research, “a group of users that both possess and express a certain interest and ideas that in some way are not mainstream or are counter hegemonic.” She gives the example of the trend #cottagecore which elicits nods and chuckles from the audience. interesting-practice mood The cottagecore trend with its slow living, back to the earth aesthetic, possesses a lot of potential for quite obvious anti-capitalism. On the surface it rejects toxic productivity and attempts to rethink our relationship to labour. It encourages those witnessing it to slow down, reconsider and take up non-digital hobbies. It is a reframing of domestic labour and illustrates a way to function outside of the capitalist and patriarchal structure. Although it began as a seemingly inclusive and progressive space there is a very clear overlap with the tradwife movement which has ties to right wing extremist spaces online (https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ak8p8/online-rise-of-trad-ideology). interesting-practice This rethinking of domestic labour then becomes the idea that unpaid, unrecognized domestic labour should be expected from women. These very different sets of beliefs fall under an eerily similar aesthetic which creates a dangerous ambiguity in aesthetics online. reflection
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

We are shown a TikTok video from the user @nichelovercore, a compilation of sentimental video clips, there are giggles from the audience when the TikTok ends with the apps familiar chiming sound. interesting-practice Agnieszka explains that corecore is an anti-trend, the name itself evokes a sense of self awareness and meta criticism. The videos explore the idea of compilation with overlapping clips; it evokes feelings of chaos. Clips come from already existing media, television ads, films, interviews, mass media and existing TikToks. They decontextualize and recontextualize content that creates a sense of disastisfaction with life within capitalism, they exist as critics of the platform in which the content exists. These videos have the potential for activating users that realize the elements of social media that are no longer working for them.
from: Trends and Aesthetics: The TikTok Limbo (report)

Jordi is a media researcher and PhD candidate at TU Delft. His research explores the intersection between philosophy, media, design, political theory, and technology. His project began during what he refers to as the darkest times of COVID. Early 2021. His goal was the abandonment of a specific way of doing theory and the issue of meaning. His project, called Infinite Scroller “proposes you, the reader/scroller, a general theory of scrolling —as much aesthetic, epistemological, and political—, while also encouraging you to experience theory as an overwhelming, multi-layered, and immanent event composed of networked text, images, and sounds to be seen, listened, touched, danced; that is, scrolled.” He explains that he started by creating fragmented video essays about TikTok on TikTok (@infinitescroller). The aim was to make theory differently, to “scroll through theory.” interesting-practice