Vortrag von Lauren Boyle am 13.11.19: Thumbs That Type and Swipe. The DIS Edutainment Network

Today’s educational platforms are conceived and built online. After curating the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and dedicating 7 years to DIS Magazine, DIS morphed into a radical streaming platform for education – dis.art – producing and publishing original series and docs by leading artists and thinkers about critical issues: the future of money and inequality; how the »liberal« and the »democratic« are pulling apart; mass entrepreneurship in China; post-nationality and citizenship; media theory in the age of trolling; the future of global food sustainability; the ethics of artificial intelligence; and the intersection of sexuality, race, and the environment, just to name a few. Michel Serres (Thumbelina, 2013) tenderly speaks of the little thumbs; meaning those who essentially gain access to the world through their thumbs. Technology’s promise of productivity is now to keep us unproductive, scrolling and tapping to keep from doing, sleek apps hiding a complexity so great no single person can grasp. Dis.art is the result of a change in attitude towards the present, and aims to meet the demands of contemporary social, political, and economic complexity at eye level.

Lauren Boyle lives and works in New York City. She is a co-founder of the collective DIS, whose cultural interventions are manifest across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific exhibitions to ongoing online projects. The early iteration of DIS was DIS Magazine (2010–2017), which produced editorials and published mixtapes alongside discourse-heavy essays on topics like data and the post-contemporary. In 2018 the collective transitioned platforms from an online magazine to a video streaming edutainment platform – dis.art – narrowing in on the future of education and entertainment. 

Bildcredits: Untitled, from Thumbs that Type and Swipe, 2018, Courtesy DIS

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