Overgaden LECTURES: Superslick Surfaces

What impact has the advent of the internet and social media on art and art institutions? Overgaden LECTURES 2016 focuses on post-internet art with two days of cases and perspectives on the phenomenon.

For the fourth year running, Overgaden invites you to join the international conference series Overgaden LECTURES, an annual event that puts key issues in contemporary art on the agenda. This year Overgaden invited Berlin-based artist and author Andreas Schlaegel to focus on the subject of post-internet art, and invite international and Danish theorists, artists, curators and communicators working in the field. Based on the idea of “call and response,” the conference format extends over two sessions, a month apart.

How does art relate to the omnipresent, virtual universe of the internet? What issues, possibilities and strategies has this digital realm generated? Does art surrender to the terms of capitalism, or can it challenge the commercial character of the web when it enters social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram? The answer is not clear-cut, and can be viewed from many angles—not only artistic, but also social, cultural and political. Based on these questions this year’s LECTURES aim to kick-start with the following thematic tracks.

The Materiality of the Virtual
One of the key themes is the relationship between virtuality and materiality in post-internet art, as well as in the broader context of the internet. How can we verbalize virtual materiality and the intangible imagery circulating on the worldwide web? Do we lack a language and visual culture that can describe the virtual experiences we have on a daily basis? What about the influence of our actions online on our physical materiality? How far removed is the virtual from physical materiality in relation to the massive global resources consumed for digital purposes, the influence global economies and the age of the Anthopocene?

The Erotics of the Digital Imaginary
Another thread running is the success story of the nearly immaterial and weightless digital image and its seductive and compelling qualities: how the production and accessibility of the virtual image ignites and haunts artistic expression and production. The panels also aim to take this issue one step further, discussing the cultural and communicative consequences of our digital production and the consumption of images in social media cycles.

Click-Bait & Spam—In the Blink of an Eye
The third theme focuses on attention as resource and commodity, and on the way the hyper circulation of news, ideas, images and goods facilitated via the internet influences us at an individual and societal level. The panelists will reflect on and discuss the human attention span, and how our capacity to concentrate and focus has been influenced and possibly reconfigured by the incessant stream of technical developments.

The panelists are:

Thursday, October 13
Toke Lykkeberg (curator and art critic), Marisa Olson (artist) , Boris Ondreička (curator, artist, author and singer), Aymeric Mansoux (Artist and course leader in Experimental Publishing, Master Media Design, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), Alessandro Ludovico (professor, artist and editor-in-chief of Neural magazine), and Hannah Black (artist and author)
Moderated by Andreas Schlaegel (artist and author)

Friday, November 18
Mohammad Salemy (curator and critic), Paul Feigelfeld (academic coordinator, Digital Cultures Research Lab, Leuphana University, Lüneburg), Sandra Mujinga (artist), Milena Hoegsberg (senior curator, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo), Tatiana Bazzichelli (artistic director, Disrupt Lab, Berlin) 
Moderated by Andreas Schlaegel (artist and author)

Overgaden LECTURES is supported by the Bikuben Foundation.