/ecm diskurs 70: Slime as Metaphor, Experience and Material Event

Talk Joshua Simon Curator and Author, Tel Aviv / Lüneburg
Moderation Luisa Ziaja /ecm-Leitungsteam, Chefkuratorin Belvedere Wien

Slime is a unique hybrid on-line and on-site project about our hybrid realities, which is curated by Joshua Simon at Secession as an on-site event and as an on-line program. Taking its name from the children’s toy—a metastable plasma-like substance that has both unique material and tactile features and a constant presence online through tutorials and documentation of people playing with it tackles the social, cultural, political, and sensory operations of digital hybridity. For the talk at /ecm, Simon will approach the digital as a social order—not a mere set of devices. Among other things, the digital transfers the costs that were formerly on the side of the employer, onto the side of the worker. Our constant atomized exposure and availability for capital both online and IRL, is what we call hybridity. By that the digital allows capital to pretend it is freed from all forms of social reproduction—from equality and accountability, to sustenance and sustainability. Where we meet today—at the point of realization, as opposed to the point of production—shifts occur in the ways meaning is organized: from strikes to riots, from working class to surplus populations, from solidarity to conspiracy, from organization to petty sovereignty. From the Internet of Things, to Autonomous Cars, Blockchain, Bitcoin and NFTs, to the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence by now all seem like your regular internet scams. For labour, they mean repression, for finance it means boom and bust and for professionals in the creative sector it is a tool. As a political metaphor is it part of the ongoing attempt of automation to have a worker with no demands—no body or soul, no kids to raise, no parents to take care of, no life. Digital hybridity enhances finance’s assault on social reproduction. The belief in the digital as an unmediated mode of operation generates sensory and political frontiers that embody this logic—be it ASMR or extreme right-wing politics.vInstagram foodies and dating apps, TikTok dancing and gentrification, pornography, conspiracy, fitness and wellness online monitor and monetize our heartbeats and broken hearts. The alignment of body-device-location aims at metabolic synchronization. Slime is what we can call this sensory and political reality of perpetual exposure on both the point of production and on the point of realization. The talk will explore slime as a metaphor, experience and material, following the program and exhibition at Secession and online.

Joshua Simon is a curator and writer based in Tel Aviv and Lüneburg, where he is working on his research on Metastability at Leuphana University. Among his books: Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press) and Being Together Precedes Being: A Textbook for The Kids Want Communism (Archive Books). He is the inaugural Impulse Visiting Professor at the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies (IKW), The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 2024. His most recent curatorial project is the hybrid exhibition Slime at Secession (slime.secession.at).

Foto Credits: Detail from Franz West’s Telefonat (1997) on a phone, and a photo on the phone of Sophia Stolz’s recreation of West’s work in cake for the Slime exhibition at Secession, February 2024.

Anmeldung unter: ecm_anmeldung@uni-ak.ac.at