About

In this event, we will be joined by Abbey Pusz and Margo Bergamini, the founders of Do Not Research, an online collaborative platform for publishing writing, visual art and beyond. They will introduce us to their project and to a broader context of post-Web 2.0 communities, meme culture and its importance to the formation of political identities. Register via Eventbrite.

This event is a part of the 2021/22 NN’s Morphisms online talks programme.

About Do Not Research

[ DO NOT RESEARCH ] is a collaborative platform for art and internet culture research.

DNR is edited, operated and managed by co-directors Abbey Pusz and Margo Bergamini. DNR emerged from Joshua Citarella’s Super Secret Sleeper Cell, an online chat community of artists and those otherwise concerned with contemporary online visual culture. It started as a community-led reading group centered around Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism but soon encompassed a nexus of blogposts, artworks, and community workshops.

About speakers

Abbey Pusz is an artist researching different utopian visions. From the first impulses of the digital age, to the limited ruptures of BLM 2020 and Occupy Wall Street, to the promise of some kind of “return,” on to the continued presence of the American Dream. Her recent work explores the often contradictory spiritual desires of today, while foregrounding the radical political demands for a postcapitalist or post-work future.

She is co-director of the publishing platform “Do Not Research” along with creating video art, sculpture and writing. She is based in New York.

Margo Bergamini is a writer interested in cultural currents critical of modernity. She researches online reactionary subcultures like the alt-right and its various competing present-day successors, all of which are themselves distinctly modern. Her essays investigate these groups’ — and others’ — autodidactic efforts, and how these efforts express a desire for beauty and refinement that neither platforms nor contemporary institutes can satisfy.

Margo is co-director of “Do Not Research,” a publishing platform. Her essays can be found there. Her poetry — which engages with the poetic tradition’s broader reaction to modernity and progress — can be found here on her Instagram.

About Morphisms

Morphisms is our autumn 2021/22 online talks programme exploring transformations and new arrangements of knowledge production. To morph is to gradually change one thing into another by describing the state in between.

As we construct new digital and physical spaces at NN, we are thinking through these transitions. In October, we will launch the inaugural Library Stack NN Contemporary Art branch; the pilot programme for a digital lending library that explores both alternative publishing models and contexts for translocation. We have also commissioned artist David Blandy to produce Northampton The World After, a role-playing experience of gaming and speculative fiction for institution building and, through a new project collaborating with the Northamptonshire Black Archives Association, we examine the potential of digital archiving as a postcolonial methodology for preserving and documenting regional black* histories.

By way of these projects’ expansion, we will invite artists, curators and thinkers to address new movements and complex interactions. Speakers will discuss their methods of exploring inaccessible, opaque systems, such as internet platforms, online libraries, search engines, and how these play an increasingly significant role in the organisation of modern life. Morphisms will delve into the organising principles that inform these algorithmic projects and new forms of cultural intelligence.

Each season, NN hosts a programme of lectures by leading artists, curators, art historians and critics, situating the organisational concerns within the larger context of contemporary art. Talks are free and open to all, and will also be documented through audio recordings that reside in the NN Archives Talks. In order to receive a Zoom link, registration is required in advance via our website or Eventbrite.

*The Northamptonshire Black History Association defines black as people and groups from visible minority communities, especially those with African and/or Asian origins.

Access Notes

The event will happen on Zoom – a link will be emailed to attendees. This event will be live captioned and transcription will be available afterwards. For help with how to set up Zoom and accessibility enquiries, email maria@nncontemporaryart.org.

This event will be recorded for archival purposes.

Image credit: A still from Flip Kostic’s 24 Hour Bed PC Livestream, an artwork published on Do Not Research.

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