Symposium - Worldbuilding in an era of extreme fragmentation

This one-day conference is an interdisciplinary event taking as its starting point the fragmentation thesis, based on the observation that our political conversations online – in forums, social media platforms, or discussion sites – are secluded into ideologically uniform groups. This tendency towards homophily is nothing new yet it has dramatically taken speed recently, to the point that it can be seen as a planetary condition of our times. The infrastructural changes in our digital networks – privatization, tracking, and algorithmic rationality – are not the sole explanatory factors. Finance capitalism, genocidal conflicts, climate crisis, as well as ambient anxiety all trigger responses that tend to favor withdrawal strategies.

The common and the 99% now tend to give ground to decentered small-scale, semi-private, invite-only forms of thinking, making, connecting, and building – in art, activism, fandom and worldbuilding alike. This strategy is certainly the most realistic: it acknowledges the impossibility of a direct opposition to platform monopolies, just as it inherits the failures of trying to repurpose mainstream corporate media in the previous decade. But where does it leave the emancipatory gestures, the utopian acts of worldbuilding, the exhilarated gambles on futurity? Can post-individualist fictioning, weirded narratives, cyber-imaginaries or emancipatory e-deologies still sustain collective horizons? We will ask ourselves how artists and arts practitioners respond to our era of extreme fragmentation, where they organize, what forms these alter-imaginaries can take, and which kind of practices they might produce.

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