Here is the CMT Uptime check phrase
Loading Events

Event Details

  • This event has passed.

Paula Harper | Viral: Metaphor, Narrative, Music

Paula Harper, Assistant Professor in the Department of Music and The College at the University of Chicago

October 7, 2024 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Times are shown in Eastern Time

1014 Tisch Hall
435 S State St
Ann Arbor,
+ Google Map

Organizer

Science, Technology, and Society Program

Abstract: Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, “going viral” had nonetheless become commonplace—the epidemiological metaphor characterizing an increasingly-familiar trajectory of explosive circulation, remix, and reportage expanding from individual nodes of audiovisual content online. This presentation briefly historicizes and contextualizes the contagious concept, before suggesting how “virality”—as aesthetic repertoire, as popular narrative, as social logic made concrescent in platform architectures—might also be understood as a form of musicality. I argue that participation in the production, watching, listening to, circulating, or sharing of “viral” digital internet objects has constituted a significant site of 21st-century musical practice. And across the 21st century, digital platforms have adapted to facilitate this viral musicality, using music’s positive capacities—aesthetic pleasure, communal participation, social connectivity—to enable corporate profit-making, corral attention, and incentivize acceptance of increasing technocapital enclosure of the internet and everyday life.

Please RSVP here. This event is hosted by STeMs Speakers Series and co-sponsored by ESC.

Sign up for email announcements to learn more.