The Cultural Meaning of the User Aesthetics and Politics of the Everyday

The user is a cultural form associated with everyday technological practice. As cultural studies emphasises, everyday practice is part of a performative process of sense-making in a complex process involving things, identities, production, consumption and regulation. Yet the everyday is a deeply neglected space in both education and the arts. In my talk I will discuss how Mastodon and Trans*Feminist Servers produce difference for everyday practice on an infrastructural, but also on a narrative level. I will argue that the narrative work of the latter can be seen as an aesthetic strategy of the everyday, addressing the everyday practice on its own terrain rather than symbolically through a work of art. „Everyday aesthetics“ can thus open new pedagogies capable of transforming the everyday into the meaningful, as a precondition for difference, and change.

Ph: Violetta Wakolbinger