Bearing
the UnBearable brings together artist-theorist and curator Kostis Stafylakis and media researcher and internet
archaeologist Sophie Publig for two guest lectures within the framework of the Experimental Game Cultures
masters program, investigating how play and network cultures modulate political affect through permacritical mimetics, synthetic
subjectivities, and post-digital dramaturgies.
Play here is foregrounded
not only as a medium, but as a methodology that asks how subjectivity can become playable, weaponized, and symptomatically
reproduced amid accelerated realities where performativity and belief collapse into one another.
Kostis
Stafylakis approaches the mediascape as a contested terrain of mimetic warfare, overidentification, and aestheticized
extremity. Moving between expanded media, theory, and curatorial practice, his work navigates through the online and physical
space of uncharted social territories and fringe communities, mapping how art intersects with disinformation, role-played
ideologies, and speculative collectivities.
Sophie Publig, Senior Scientist at the Weibel Institute
for Digital Cultures, investigates digital ecosystems, the dynamics of internet memes and digital cultures. With a focus on
planetarity and the interconnections between living and non-living beings, Sophie approaches media discourse from an eco-digital
perspective.
The event is curated and moderated by
Babak Ahteshamipour, an interdisciplinary artist,
filmmaker, musician, writer, and curator based between Vienna and Athens whose practice examines mimetic affect, machinic
subjectivity, chronopolitics, ecology, and beyond-human coexistence through gaming and internet culture.
A
Ludic Method Soirée hosted by Margarete Jahrmann, Experimental Game Cultures in cooperation with the Weibel Institute for
Digital Cultures
