Sen. Sc. Dr. phil. MA Sophie Publig
Sophie Publig is a Senior Scientist and digital ecosystem explorer, navigating the intricate webs of the online realm from her base at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has been actively engaged in independent research in the fields of media theory, critical posthumanism, post-apocalyptic narratives, and contemporary art and is determined to unearth the symbiotic relations between technology, culture, and the environment.
Her doctoral thesis from 2023, The Sympoietic Life of Internet Memes, was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Clemens Apprich and formerly Prof. Peter Weibel and explores 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. This is also reflected in her work as an Associate Researcher since 2020 at the Critical Media Lab in Basel, where she has been working closely with Dr. Jamie Allen on theories and practices of the Anthropocene.
Although Sophie’s academic education at the University of Vienna, Free University Berlin, and University of Warsaw focused on Art History, she has dived into various disciplines including Ethnology, Architecture, Mathematics, and Contemporary History. In addition to her sought-after teaching at the Weibel-Institute and the School for Transformation, her interdisciplinary approach to learning is complemented by freelancing and collective ways of working including writing, publishing, speaking, and artistic research. In her free time, Sophie enjoys photography, video gaming, and the movies, particularly the genres of science fiction and horror.
Conact
Office Hours: by Appointment
Email: sophie.publig[at]uni-ak.ac.at
Showroom: Sophie Publig
- title
- A Schizoanalysis of Schizoposting
- type
- Speech
- keywords
- Philosophy, Digital Cultures, Schizoposting, Psychoanalysis
- texts
- Abstract
- Schizoposting—characterized by fragmented syntax, disjunctive rhethorics, an overwhelming semiotic density, and layers of post-irony—has emerged from anonymous message boards as one of the most fascinating expressions of contemporary digital subjectivity. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s foundations in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, this lecture performance undertakes a schizoanalysis of schizoposting, exploring how brainrot memes disorganize subjectivity and “follow[s] the machinic indices of deterritorialization.” (1) In the schizoanalytic tradition, schizoposting is not understood as an appropriation of schizophrenia, but an “optimal enlargement of pragmatic entrances into Unconscious formations.” (2) This performance lecture operates as a theoretical intervention and a schizoid media experiment while treating the online collective unconscious “as an acentered system, as a machinic network of finite automata.” (3) Through a live synthesis of performative reading and meme analysis, I will unpack schizoposting’s simulation of schizophrenic rhetoric; its paranoid chains of associations, its ecstatic overproduction of meaning, and its immersion into accelerationist absurdity. Rather than dismissing schizoposting as pure nonsense, I argue that its delirious compositions function as an experimental form of poetic irony, a productive insight into the collective unconscious, and a mode of posting circumventing algorithmic control, even as it remains deeply embedded within capitalism’s cybernetic flows. By mapping the machinic assemblages of brainrot memes—their viral transmission, their repetitive-compulsive rhethorics, and their potential to instantiate new productive modes of subjectivity beyond the neurotic individualism of Oedipus—this lecture performance asks: What does the schizoposting subject desire? How does schizoposting intensify or subvert digital capitalist production? And can the syntax of schizoposting provide lines of flight toward new political potentials? References: (1) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press: 1983, 316. (2) Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, Indiana University Press: 1995, 68. (3) Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, University of Minnesota Press: 1987, 18
- lecturers
- Sophie Publig
- title of event
- Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference
- organisers/management
- Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design
- date, time and location
- date
- 2025-06-17 - 2025-06-19
- location
- Konstfack, Stockholm, ST, Schweden
- URL
- https://app.konstfack.se/dgs2025/programme/
