“File Under: Slime”

“File Under: Slime” by Christopher Michlig

Please join us for a book talk with Department of Art faculty Christopher Michlig, followed by a discussion with College of Design dean Adrian Parr.

Book talk and discussion with Adrian Parr:
Friday, January 27, 2023 at 5:00 p.m.
510 Oak, Eugene, OR 97403

Presented by the Center for Art Research and the UO Design Library “Books on Design” series.

What is slime? We are well acquainted with its qualities in conjunction with certain things from which we tend to recoil but to which we are also at times fervently attracted. Despite being everywhere, slime is a surprisingly unexamined cultural phenomenon. File Under: Slime collates a cultural history of “slime” and “sliminess,” with particular emphasis on precedents in pop-culture, contemporary art, ecology, science fiction, literature, critical theory, and cinema.

Artist and professor Christopher Michlig’s research characterizes slime as a pervasive, oozing, cultural phenomenon, documenting instances of its evolving representations, ranging from philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s meditation on the aberrant substance in his 1943 work Being and Nothingness, to the cooptation of it as a ubiquitous visual and cinematic trope referencing the grotesque, transgressive, and paranormal.