2025 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series at The CourtauldOn Parasocial Media: The Shoggoth and the SkeuomorphGary Zhexi Zhang

METAMERS, Gary Zhexi Zhang, 2024. Photo by Remy Ugarte Vallejos. Courtesy of the artist and EPFL Enter the Hyper-Scientific

In this lecture, the artist and writer Gary Zhexi Zhang will discuss the internet, AI, and the techno-politics of persona through an account of ‘parasocial media’. Online identity formation and the infrastructures of consensus reality have evolved dramatically across the platform era and into the world of ubiquitous language models. The boundaries between persons and personas, characters and identities, fandoms and botnets, dissolve into a psychosocial spectrum connecting live-action role-play and dissociative identity disorder to NPC culture, chatbot love and AI psychosis.

Mark Fisher discussed psychedelic reason as the dismantlement of the ‘Human OS’ on the neuronal battleground, invoking not only the social but the psyche as a mutable terrain of collective emancipation. Contemporary technologies have answered only part of Fisher’s call, unfettering the techniques of human sociality not from but through the prison-house of language, at social scale. Zhang will examine the infrastructural conditions of networked psychic collectivity, what he calls the ‘internet of egregores’, and the economic forces that choreograph them. He will also discuss the role of role-play, from an affordance of mediated identity to the skeuomorphic labour of AI. Finally, Zhang will explore what it means to be ‘person enough’ at a time when personalised affect is cheaply mass-produced and widely demanded. Jolting between the early internet and contemporary global techno-acceleration, Zhang explores the ramifications of a dissociative realism whose temporalities and intimacies unravel both our world and our selves, to borrow Fisher’s words, like an escape kit without an instruction manual.

This is the first event in the 2025 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series: Psychedelic Reason. This annual programme of artist talks, conversations and screenings provides a platform for artists, curators and scholars of East and Southeast Asian heritage to share their research and practice with wider audiences, focusing on issues of transculturality and representation in the global contemporary.

Convened by Dr Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at The Courtauld; Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Director at Asymmetry; and Dr Yayu Zheng, Asymmetry Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld.

Free entry, book a ticket here