I have been co-organising this event about different practices of the "avatar". if you are in london, check it out! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/animating-...

LC#30: Partisan Podcasters On the recent US election and comedians making waves in political discourse.

new letdown comedy newsletter out this afternoon, on rogan's partisan turn: letdowncomedy.substack.com/p/lc30-parti...

i talked w/ @jeremybailey, @LeoSelvaggio1, @Jess_Herrington & Lark Spartin to discuss the critical limits/opportunities of negotiating creative boundaries within platform art and the creative/tech industries

this enables unprecedented opportunities for self-representation and imagination in an "actually existing metaverse", which is in some ways a middle ground between social media and avatar-based metaverses.

the article explores the cultural relevance of AI-driven, experience focused applications like AR face filters in pushing social media away from the tricky realm of "information" and "truth" and into the more ambiguous terrain of "performance"

Meta’s artistic turn: AR face filters, platform art, and the actually existing metaverse This paper approaches the emergence of ‘metaverses’ as inherently tied to the platformisation of identity ushered in by social media. I focus on Meta’s reliance on the performative engagement of us...

New open-access paper out! I interviewed four artists who work critically with AR face filters to investigate what I call "Meta's artistic turn" and how the establishment of new infrastructures for performing the self can be creatively negotiated with. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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we could see the jake paul win over mike tyson - and his "age of truth" remark after the fight - as an example of trumpian realism. the matrix we live in is a rage-bait industry where we all cling to fading values and plug ourselves in to witness as they get destroyed

productive links to stuff i cite: @EmilyRosamond's paper on "personality as infrastructure", @mediastudied + @marxnick's politico-economical reading of US conservative comedy, @BraunFerrari's discussion of elon musk's celebrity mgmt in financialised capitalism

in particular, i frame its slippery ideological profile in relation to cancel culture by explaining its "roast universalist" comedy ethos and how it interacts with three platforming practices (cohortification, re-platfroming, shaping infrastructural discourse)

Platforming the Joe Rogan Experience: Cancel Culture, Comedy, and Infrastructure - Nicola Bozzi, 2024 This paper outlines a cultural critique of the Joe Rogan Experience. Framing the podcast as an adaptive cultural platform, I emphasize how it is ideologically i...

open access paper out!
i discuss the infrastructural role of the joe rogan experience podcast and its cultural role within platformisation: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...