Sophie Publig, mentor of LAB 5 The Mechanics of Truth

Sophie Publig is a Senior Scientist, lecturer, and internet archaeologist based at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna. She is joining Medialab Matadero as a mentor of the LAB 5 The Mechanics of Truth program.

Her research moves across media theory, critical posthumanism, aesthetics, and digital cultures, with particular attention to how platforms produce belief, networked subjectivities, and political imaginations. Current projects explore the paradigm shift of digital occultism; the post-identity of the Girl Online; and trajectories of the digital unconscious across platform cultures. 

For Publig, The Mechanics of Truth becomes especially interesting once we stop treating ‘truth’ and fiction as clean opposites. As she says in her introduction, “The internet has turned reality into a participatory process unfolding continuously through platforms, feeds, memes, aesthetics, and acts of narration. Users increasingly orient themselves through symbolic worlds assembled from fragments circulating across networked environments. Memes mutate into folklore, conspiracy theories become collective mythologies, and entire micro cultures emerge around ambiguous emotional atmospheres, occult references, and shared vibes.” 

“What fascinates me about this shift is how collective realities are always produced socially and technologically at the same time.” 

As a mentor of the Collaborative Prototyping Lab, Publig “hopes to work alongside participants investigating these strange new conditions of reality production through artistic research, experimentation, collaborative thinking, and technocultural world-building. The internet keeps producing new worlds. I’m interested in exploring how we can learn to navigate them together.”