'Music & Memes - The Participatory Self' Lecture by Michael Waugh

Glossy surfaces, the language of advertisement and sarcastic statements to the state of society - ‘Post-Internet’ is mostly associated with a particular aesthetic of irony and kitsch. Dr. Michael Waugh, lecturer and researcher at the University of Hertfordshire, makes an attempt to dissolve the term from this often maligned reading and reclaim it as a wider signifier of contemporary identity in a world driven by symbiotic relationships between young people and digital networks. Post-Internet art thus encompasses a larger body of work that sincerely considers the lives of youths operating on/offline simultaneously.

In his lecture at 3hd Festival, Waugh, who completed his doctoral thesis in 2016 about Post-Internet identity and its impact on musical production, distribution and consumption, utilizes the symbiotic Post-Internet relationship as a platform on which he builds an analysis of the impact of social media on today’s musical expression. He studies musicians whose output displays (not always self-consciously) an aesthetic and thematic affinity with social networking phenomena such as over sharing, participatory culture, self-celebritisation, information overload, and memes.

Entrance fee: 4,00 €