Curriculum Vitae
Sophie Publig is an internet archaeologist and Senior Scientist at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research moves across critical posthumanism, digital cultures, and aesthetics, analyzing online phenomena from meme ecologies to networked subjectivities to internet folklore. Her doctoral thesis The Sympoietic Life of Internet Memes (2023, supervised by Peter Weibel and Clemens Apprich) developed an eco-digital framework for understanding meme dynamics through the lens of sympoiesis. Since then, her research has expanded into questions on platform aesthetics and computational culture. Her dissertation is forthcoming with punctum books. She is currently editing In Search of... The Girl Online (meson press), an anthology examining digital feminism and computational identity as part of her ongoing co-research with Charlotte Reuß. Alongside this, she is co-authoring a book with Mikkel Rørbo on digital occultism, tracing the entanglement of communication technology and esoteric practice from telegraphy and séances through to schizoposting, conspirituality, and chaos magick. Her work engages closely with questions of algorithmic subjectivity, the collective digital unconscious, and ideological undercurrents of internet cultures, including ongoing research into brain rot content, internet humor and post-irony, and the collapse of traditional meaning-making structures online. Her formation as a researcher was also shaped by her time as an Associate Researcher at the Critical Media Lab Basel (2020–2024), where she worked closely with Dr. Jamie Allen on theories and practices of planetarity and the Anthropocene. Sophie's academic formation spans the University of Vienna, Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Warsaw, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with studies in Art History, Ethnology, Architecture, Mathematics, and Contemporary History. She teaches interdisciplinary seminars on meme cultures, media theory, and platform aesthetics at the Weibel Institute and Art x Science | School for Transformation. Her work takes form across writing, teaching, speaking, and artistic research.
