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 2025-26 Asymmetry Distinguished Lecture Series – Psychedelic Reason. Generously sponsored by Asymmetry, this annual programme of artist talks, conversations and screenings provide 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 Post-doctoral Fellow at The Courtauld.
Speaker:
Gary Zhexi Zhang is a visual artist and writer living and working between UK and China. His work explores systemic connections between cosmology, technology, and the economy. He recently published Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023), a collection of essays, fictions and interviews about finance and time. Recent solo artistic presentations include METAMERS at EPFL Pavilions and the 9th Asian Art Biennial, Taichung. He has published widely in academic and artistic platforms on art, economy, technology, and is working on a book about multipolar technoculture. He is currently an associate lecturer at Goldsmiths and an associate lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, where he is also an associate tutor. For more information: https://www.zhexi.info/.
