Mental and Material Images of Contemporary Capitalism.

Abstract

What are possible artistic forms of resistance in the context of contemporary capitalism, which is aiming at the colonization of our mind, affects and desires? This essay examines contemporary post-cinematic media within the framework of contemporary capitalism, labeled as cognitive, neuro, mental, emotional, affective, platform or surveillance and capitalism’s entanglement with other oppressive ideologies and positivist neurosciences, that results in so-called “neuroculture”. I explore how these oppressive ideologies exert themselves through contemporary media technologies and produce specific formal-aesthetic predicaments such as high quality, smoothness, operationality, modulation, fluidity, flexibility and the manipulative microtemporality. Furthermore, I point at artistic practices capable of unsettling hegemonic structures underlying technology, form and content in contemporary media production and consumption such as the digital abject, the glitchy, the low resolution, and the extreme slowness. The transdisciplinary research is situated within the field of cinema and media studies and invites ideas from cognitive sciences, neurosciences, computer vision and