With FLUX: Post-/Human, we ask about the present and future of the limits between human and technology in Media Art. Is consciousness really an epiphenomenon, its embodiment a happy accident or can it be a human creation? How does the synthesis between human and machine affect our perception of self and other? Where is posthuman Art heading? Curated by Oliver Gingrich, FLUX invites an array of contemporary artists working across different media to discuss Post-/Human practices.
FUTURE LOVE @Futurefest 17-18 september 2016
The next decade will bring a diversity of love partners for us to choose from – lovebots with intelligent skin, cyborgs with sensory implants, tele-dildonic connected avatars, through to empathetic personal carers loving you day and night. There will be intense debate on the ethical issues that emerge. As human cyborgs appear more often in our communities, as our friends bring robot lovers to dinner, as touch, caress and gaze technology converge, we will see virtual reality, augmented reality and holograms deepening and intensifying our virtual-physical immersive experiences. This expert panel will debate this looping of our senses and emotions with these ‘non-human humans’. Chair: Luke Robert Mason, Director, Virtual Futures Panelists: Trudy Barber, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader, Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth Marco Donnarumma, Marco Donnarumma, performance artist and research fellow, Universität der Künste Berlin Anna Troisi, Digital artist and researcher Text from http://www.futurefest.org/speaker/synthetic-emotions http://www.futurefest.org/
What is the future for teaching and learning in creative industries faculties? The Faculty Strategic Planning, Bournemouth University - 18 Oct 2016
If the future is unknown how can we embed it into our curricula and into our pedagogy? Generic skills may seem to offer the basis of just a learning for an unknown future, but in this talk I would like to suggest that in contrast to the idea of generic skills I will refer to creation of a pedagogy for human being. Learning for an unknown future has to be a learning of human qualities and disposition and not just of knowledge of skills. We want to forge not just practitioner but better humans, we do not want students to just find a job, we want students to invent new jobs. We need to trigger the desire for innovation and self improvement. How can we jump from skill requirement to pleasure and excitement?
Practice as “Search” towards a different form of knowledge Intersections 2016: Practice (...) Research 14-15 January 2016 The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
“Research” has always been a tricky word when associated to the practice towards an artistic purpose. The major aim of research has always been related to a form of investigation, analysis, inspection and assessment. The epistemological intrinsic aspect of the research brought us thinking that every approach to create knowledge and awareness should pass through a research methodology to deserve the right to be validated and to produce an appreciable output.
As digital artist and performer, my input material, my research pathway and my final results, collide in a mixture of scientific and artistic vibrant matter, but it is not always true that they are really so distinct. I use to code and I use my scientific background while sculpting my artistic outputs, but I never considered the practical side of my work as a standard research process but rather a “search”. I spend my academic research time looking trough physical, abstract or virtual spaces carefully to find the right interpretation for something that I already have in my mind. Instead of “researching” I look for paradigms that enable my performances to use the real world as a media. I search and my every day practice is searching towards a form of knowledge that cannot be described with scientific words such as “output” or “finding”.
Do we really need to investigate, inspect or assess in order to produce arts?
Additionally while being able to contextualise our artworks is of great help to enhance the philosophical potentiality of our work, will it be likewise useful for the audience to perceive a performance as a layered sliced form of expression where every detail is revealed? Is academia trying to force a different form of knowledge in a context that worked well and still works well for other forms of knowledge?