Article:
Symbolic misery and digital media: How NFTs reproduce culture industries

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dc.creatorBocquillon, Rémy
dc.creatorvan Loon, Joost
dc.date.accessioned2023-01-26T09:53:46Z
dc.date.available2023-01-26T09:53:46Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.description.abstractThis contribution will attempt to propose a critical and philosophical engagement with the discussion around NFTs by focusing on the articulation of materialisms and digital media in artistic practices. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that culture industries led to the formation of a symbolic misery, disrupting aesthetic experience through the creation and imposition of practices of consumption;[2] a process reinforced by the technological reproduction of works of art. In recent years, the discussion around Web 3.0, blockchain technologies, and their implementation through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also reformulates the question of digital reproduction and distribution of works of art.[3] Indeed, in a market dominated by centralised streaming platforms such as Spotify, many artists see in NFTs a way to regain control over their own works and tools, by creating a form of artificial scarcity, mimicking the limited quantity and binding ownership of physical artefacts, as a kind of magical individuation, to paraphrase Simondon.[4] The authors ask to which extent those technologies, although often posited as a liberation from corporate giants, might lead to an exacerbation of the process of proletarianisation which is at the core of Stiegler’s thesis on symbolic misery, even if they are being procured in an ethos of social justice and responsibility, thereby functioning as what Michel Serres called a virtual object.[5] Moreover, it will be argued that by trying to reproduce an artificial idea of scarcity, NFTs also tend to reduce materiality to the object being sold and possessed, consequently reproducing the constitution of ‘art’ as a market, where new practices of consumption and competition are being championed as commodities at the expense of aesthetic experience.en
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19180
dc.identifier.urihttps://necsus-ejms.org/symbolic-misery-and-digital-media-how-nfts-reproduceculture- industries/
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/20351
dc.languageeng
dc.publisherNECS
dc.publisher.place
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2213-0217
dc.relation.ispartofseriesNECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subjectNFTsen
dc.subjectblockchainen
dc.subjectproletarianisationen
dc.subjectreal abstractionen
dc.subjectnegentropyen
dc.subject.ddcddc:791
dc.subject.ddcddc:300
dc.titleSymbolic misery and digital media: How NFTs reproduce culture industriesen
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typeArticleen
local.coverpage2023-01-27T13:25:38
local.identifier.firstpublishedhttps://necsus-ejms.org/symbolic-misery-and-digital-media-how-nfts-reproduceculture- industries/
local.source.epage45
local.source.issue2
local.source.issueTitle#Materiality
local.source.spage24
local.source.volume11

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