The immersive potential of aesthetic forms always begs the question of their vitality. In view of the shifts as well as the continuities concerning (aesthetic) notions of vitality from the mechanical modernity to the digital present, the lecture will engage with the specificities of a digital vitality within art and beyond. The lecture will focus on its materiality, form and function as well as on the question as to who/what counts as “alive” online and offline and who/what does not, and with which political and aesthetic consequences.

Jenny Nachtigall teaches at the Institute of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She earned her doctorate in 2016 at the Department of History of Art at University College London. At the moment she is concluding her work on the monograph that is resulting from her doctorate and she is working on the afterlives of vitalism in modern/contemporary art and theory. Recently published contributions include: “Vitalism/ ‘Vivid Form’” (2018, in: Neolithic Childhood. Art an the Wrong Present, ca. 1930, ed. Anselm Franke, Tom Holert), “The Modern Subject, a Dead Form Living. On the Aesthetics of (a Fractured) Vitalism“ (forthcoming; Post-Apocalyptic Self-Reflection, hg. Tanja Widmann, Laura Preston) and Klassensprachen – Written Praxis, (2017 ed. With Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Stakemeier, Stephanie Weber) She writes among others for Texte zur Kunst and Artforum.