Palo Fabuš
Is It Possible to Democratize the Reality Itself?
12.10.2017 / 6pm
Our first VALS speaker of the semester is Palo Fabuš, editor-in-chief of Umělec, an art magazine devoted to Czech visual culture with readers and contributors from all over the world. His interest in new media has evolved into research of wider contemporary culture, where he 'dabbles', as he puts it, in a variety of approaches such as sociology, media ecology and philosophy. His research centres these days mostly on the relationship of information technology and the human condition.
Palo Fabuš will be talking about the new sensitivity - born at the end of the 20th century - towards the nature of the reality, and asking why are we getting so interested in ontology, what role technology has to play in this development, and what sort of challenges it means for us. I hope to show that reality isn't just something we encounter or explore but also co-create, entangled in all sorts of natural and technical processes. It is about creativity in its most banal but also most important form, and the question of how we should use our understanding of reality is fundamentally political.
Palo Fabuš attended Masaryk University in Brno, where he received his Bc in applied informatics from the Faculty of Informatics, and his MA from the Department of Media Studies and Journalism in the Faculty of Social Sciences. From 2004 to 2005 he was editor-in-chief of the magazine 'IM6', and from 2005 to 2006 curator of Zoom festival. He worked as an editor of Literární noviny from 2005 to 2008, and was the cofounder of the arts listings website Jlbjlt in 2007.
He has taught in the Social Media course at the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at Masaryk University, and given guest lectures at FF MU Brno, FaVU Brno, FIT VUT Brno. as well as FAMU Prague, UMPRUM and AVU Prague. Since 2009 he has been an editor of Umělec magazine, and since 2011 its editor-in-chief.
Image source: Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
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