This sounds like an incredible conference. Trying to find out if it’s being livestreamed or recorded…
Keynote Lecture
“Dark Cloud: Shapes of Information”
◆ David Joselit, Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York
This lecture will explore how the metaphor of “the cloud” as an elastic and scalable information storage system applies to artists’ efforts to demonstrate the shapes that information can assume – in other words, information’s plasticity. Two primary themes will be addressed: profiling, as a technique for personifying configurations of data, and extraterritoriality, as the capacity for information (like the weather) to break free from particular locations and thus to challenge territorial forms of sovereignty. Are spaces of extraterritorial information also sites from which political claims can be made? Or, on the contrary, do we need to protect ourselves from the exposure of information’s easy circulation – operating not from a darknet but from a Dark Cloud?
21 March 2015 10am-7.30pm
10.00-11.15am
Panel 1: Medium
With:
◆ Maeve Connolly, writer, lecturer in the Faculty of Film, Art and Creative Technologies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin
◆ Katrina Sluis, artist, writer, curator Digital Programmes Photographers’ Gallery London
◆ Ben Vickers, curator of Digital Serpentine Galleries, London
Moderated by:
◆ Toke Lykkeberg, curator, Copenhagen
The first panel will focus on the concept of the medium. Digital techniques and tools have transformed raditional disciplines and blurred their external boundaries, while new and emerging forms of artistic roduction reflect the increasing ubiquity of the digital. This panel invites a discussion of the medium as an analytical entity, revisiting the concept of medium specificity. Does it still make sense to think in formal, media-related categories or have we moved beyond the medium as a recognisable and classifiable entity in the age of pervasive computing?
11.45am-1pm
Panel 2: Structures and Textures
With:
◆ Diedrich Diederichsen, critic, journalist, author, Berlin
◆ Kerstin Stakemeier, researcher, critic, Munich
◆ Christopher Kulendran Thomas, artist, London/Berlin
Moderated by:
◆ Victoria Camblin, editor/artistic director of Art Papers, Atlanta
◆ Carson Chan, writer and curator, Princeton University, New Jersey
Computational processes can be traced everywhere and are intrinsically interwoven in the fabric of our lives. This hybrid reality increasingly affects the materiality of artistic production in a variety of fields and disciplines. This panel will examine how online culture has affected our understanding of materials and question how contemporary art is shaped by the infrastructures that subtend the digital realm. Considering how the art world’s traditional spaces, such as the gallery or the museum, relate to the internet as a repository and space for the reception of art, the discussion will explore how spectatorship is constituted now that we have become used to online viewing habits. How do artists’ practices extend and relate to online spaces, and how has the production and dissemination of artworks changed?
2-3.15pm
Panel 3: Society
With:
◆ Stephan Dillemuth, artist, Munich
◆ Constant Dullaart, artist, Berlin
Co-moderated by:
◆ Kristoffer Gansing, artistic director Transmediale, Berlin
◆ Hito Steyerl, artist, filmmaker, writer, Berlin
When considering the history of online culture, one sees a significant shift in how networked environments have been perceived as common spaces. The 1990s ideal of cyberspace, where knowledge and resources were shared freely, has largely given way to a webspace that is commercial and enclosed. Vast parts of the contemporary internet are presently owned by a few private mega-companies, which capitalise on the content and data generated by the users of their platforms. The internet has turned into a network via which everything is profiled and monitored for commercial and state interests beyond users’ control. This panel focuses on artistic strategies of resistance in response to present mechanisms of control.
With:
◆ Jesse Darling, artist, London
◆ Cécile B. Evans, artist, Berlin/London
◆ Cornelia Sollfrank, artist, Dundee
Moderated by:
◆ Elvia Wilk, writer, editor, Berlin
The last panel will zoom in on the individual subject, discussing notions such as affect, emotion, and solidarity online. Artists are invited to talk about their work relating to the question of how identities are established and configured through the various digital and material environments constituting our realities. If bodies don’t end at the skin but instead extend to and reconfigure themselves with the material environments they engage with, what kind of implications do digital technologies have for conceptions of representation, embodiment, and gender? If the various platforms we engage with influence our structures of feeling, how do they shape the way affective ties are created and mediated?
5.30-6.15pm
“What Was Pre-Post-Internet? Why Net Art and Cybernetics Are Forgotten”
Keynote Lecture
◆ Melissa Gronlund, writer, critic, co-editor of Afterall journal, London/Abu Dhabi
In her presentation Melissa Gronlund will contest the notion that the present postinternet moment occupies a uniquely ahistorical position based on the enormity of the internet’s effects on daily life. The histories of net art, cybernetics, and other new media forms, which would appear to be the obvious forerunners to today’s internet-based art, are not typically cited by artists as relevant, nor do their concerns and methodologies seem to have taken off. This presentation will offer some hypotheses as to why this might be the case, including a shift away from modernism and towards depiction and literary realism. Other contextual factors, such as the role of contemporary internet art in the art world and market, will be addressed.
