Poor theory: Art and participatory cultures of the Post-truthacene

For a long time, artists and entertainers have willfully employed cheap acts of fakery, deception, and mythmaking as a means of instilling awe and wonder in audiences, or as a way of critiquing and subverting institutions of power. But do such fictive approaches in art still hold up? What is art’s role in the “post-truthacene”, a time of disinformation, planetary crisis, and infinite distraction?

These are key questions surrounding Parry’s artistic research, which has an ongoing engagement with participatory internet cultures, pop celebrity and the occult. Thinking ecologically through post-truth contexts and Parry’s own projects, this lecture explores examples of the vernacular internet with radically opposing ideologies – from the queer fanfictions of boyband fans, afro-futurist image-worlds of science-fiction, and the magic spells of TikTok witches and wellness gurus; through to the viral memes of anonymous shit-posters, and paranoid conspiracy theories of Pizzagate and Qanon.

On re-deploying the practices of digital folklore in artistic research and performance settings, we will begin exploring methodological clues for surviving the “post-truthacene”; calling forth new realities or finding new ways of relating to one another.

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