Habitual new media, or how things remain
A lecture by Wendy Chun

This talk responds to the question: how does post-Internet art remain, even as it seems to disappear? How can we understand the odd ways that new media remains and disseminates through its obsolescence?

Against the analytic, creative, and commercial approaches that concentrate on anticipating or creating the future, the next big thing--from algorithms that sift through vast amounts of data in order to suggest/predict future purchases to  scholarly analyses focused on the impact of technologies that do not yet exist--this talk argues that new media matter most when they seem not to matter at all, that is, when they’ve moved from the new to the habitual. Through habits we become our machines: repetition breeds expertise and boredom.