LECTURE #7: Sean Dockray
Interface, Access, Loss
with respondent Jake Goldenfein
This lecture surveys how the structure of digital property has changed over the past few years with the growth of ‘the cloud’. Drawing on concepts from computer science, it traces a path from the peer-to-peer utopianism of a decade ago to the power and data centralising within today’s Internet platforms. It is a dark lecture, written under the cloud’s shadow, but I’ll conclude with an attempt to gesture toward some cracks in those interfaces that define the seemingly impermeable contours of this new reality.
Sean Dockray is an artist, a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School andaaaarg.org. As a research fellow the Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University last year, he explored the physical infrastructure of the sharing economy, focusing on Facebook’s new northern European datacenter. His written essays address topics such as online education (Frieze), the militarisation of universities (in Contestations: Learning from Critical Experiments in Education), book scanning (Fillip), traffic control (Cabinet), and radio (Volume).
Date: 6:00pm for 6:30pm start, Wednesday 30 October 2020
Venue: Gertrude Contemporary, 200 Gertrude St Fitzroy
Free, no RSVP required.
Discipline website