Ludic Method Soirée: Bearing the UnBearable

LUDIC SOIRÈE: Bearing the UnBearable in cooperation with Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures. 
GUESTS: Kostis Stafylakis in Dialogue with Babak Ahteshamipour & Sophie Publig
Date: 25.03.2026, 18:00
Location: Experimental Game Cultures Studio

Bearing the UnBearable brings together artist-theorist and curator Kostis Stafylakis and media researcher and internet archaeologist Sophie Publig for two guest lectures within the framework of the Experimental Game Cultures masters program at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in collaboration with the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, investigating how play and network cultures modulate political affect through permacritical mimetics, synthetic subjectivities, and post-digital dramaturgies.

 

This event is a prelude to the April 22nd Ludic Method Symposium. 

Kostis Stafylakis approaches the mediascape as a contested terrain of mimetic warfare, overidentification, and aestheticized extremity. Moving between expanded media, theory, and curatorial practice, his work navigates through the online and physical space of uncharted social territories and fringe communities, mapping how art intersects with disinformation, role-played ideologies, and speculative collectivities.

Sophie Publig, Senior Scientist at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, investigates digital ecosystems, the dynamics of internet memes and digital cultures. With a focus on planetarity and the interconnections between living and non-living beings, Sophie approaches media discourse from an eco-digital perspective.

The event is curated and moderated by Babak Ahteshamipour, an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, musician, writer, and curator based between Vienna and Athens whose practice examines mimetic affect, machinic subjectivity, chronopolitics, ecology, and beyond-human coexistence through gaming and internet culture.

Play here is foregrounded not only as a medium, but as a methodology that asks how subjectivity can become playable, weaponized, and symptomatically reproduced amid accelerated realities where performativity and belief collapse into one another.