The lecture-performance On the Cybergothic is a short audiovisual interrogation of the politics of substitution. While substitution of politics is a general condition (“Having looked for politics in order to avoid it, we move next to each other, so we can be beside ourselves”, - say Moten and Harney in the Undercommons), the politics of substitution is one of its digital-born symptoms. As we are offered neoliberal “politics” as a substitute, our digital shadows grow into doppelgängers, substitutes of ourselves in the eyes of larger infrastructures. From digital twins and grief bots to smart home as dual-use tech, the worlds of the cybergothic violence are never too far. How far does the substitution stretch? What haunts our online spaces? What ways of being, mourning and existing online can we embody?

This will be followed by a collective discussion that will interrogate the wider framework of the politics of haunting/haunted, drawing threads from the transmediale instances contributed by the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics group (Winchester School of Art).

"Ours is a time with a dark heart, ripe for the noir, the gothic and the baroque" (Zafón 2010). How do we develop a necropolitics of resistance in this political climate, saturated by crisis real and fabricated, persevering in conditions that are unthinkable, being sucked / plunged into something we might conceptualise as ‘cybergothic’ (Van Elferen 2009, Konior 2020, Anikina 2024)? How do we live in proximity to this horror that is both palpable and incorporeal, the toll that it takes, still persisting and working despite the increasing weight?

Haunting, writes Avery F. Gordon, ‘is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done [...] precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done’ (2008, p. xvi). It also implies the kind of haunted, occult space described by Franz Fanon, Sonjah Stanley Niaah, or Katherine McKittrick; potential places of redemptive, transformative simultaneity, where the haunting presence and the haunted present are both proximate and synergistic.

This event is part of a cooperation between transmediale and the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group (CIIP), supported by the Winchester School of Arts, University of Southampton.