Kalendář

O přednášce

This talk summarizes the findings of #u.r.ban_ed, a digital media project (Anthropocene Media Lab), to re-think small-town habitation and urban decay, and situate them within mediations of the cultural imaginaries of the Anthropocene. Drawing on the works of Manovich (2016), Crist and Shoemaker (2014), and Landsverk (2014), #u.r.ban_ed asks how Instagram as digital archive is used to shape the perception of space, how technologies of conservation, curation and commemoration (Sendyka 2017) link subjective experiences of habitation and decay to political notions of the human monument. To that end, this talk uses the concepts of the habitat and the ruin to explain how the images in #u.r.ban_ed connect lived experiences and mediations of urban decay to human memory and nonhuman temporalities.

Instagram habitually features representations of metropolitan spaces as well as of styled-up/romanticized, atmospheric rural locations. Both genres share a lot of commonalities regarding specific thematic and aesthetic traits, and a logic of composition – mobilized to produce an urban ‘hype’, or a rural nostalgia. Within the Anthropocene, the habitat stands for vulnerability and resilience, encapsulating the dynamics of adaptation and degradation, and implies processes of signification where the physical spaces and structures of habitation are linked to historical temporalities and political agency. The paper argues that by contrast, the ruin emerges as a central trope denoting the connectedness of the cultural practices of remembrance – and the challenges that arise from the recognition and readability (Colebrook, 2016) of their meanings from the perspective of a possible nonhuman future. It symbolizes not only the tangible remnants of past social structures but also serves as a relic, as a medium channelling the fragility and transience of human existence within the broader context of epochal (and planetary) transformations. It prompts reflection on the interplay between human agency, memory, and the environment.

The paper argues that documenting decay (monuments that tap into the intimate, the personal and the historical) is always-already tied to the mediation nostalgia. While the underlying aesthetics of ruins remains fundamentally human-centric, it unmasks a tension between the loss of the past and the (im)possibility of reading ruins in a nonhuman future.

The event was supported by the Charles University UNCE programme number UNCE/24/SSH/026.

O Davidu Levente Palatinusovi

David Levente Palatinus is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Trnava and at the Technical University of Liberec. He is also founder of the Anthropocene Media Lab. His research moves between and across visual studies, digital media, and cultural theory. He has worked and written on violence in serial culture and human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. He is co-editor of the ECREA section of Critical Studies in Television Online, and sits on the editorial board of Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures (Bloomsbury Publishing, UK). His recent publications include two edited collections J.R.R. Tolkien in Central Europe: Context, Directions and the Legacy. Routledge, 2023 (with Janka Kascakova), and Itinerari LIX (Thematic Issue): Perspectives in the Anthropocene: Beyond Nature and Culture. (Mimesis Edizioni, 2020, with Stefania Achella).