Critical Strategies in Art and Media: Perspectives of New Cultural Practices
A roundtable conference of digital theorists and practitioners on the future of cultural intelligence and freedoms.
September 10, 2009 - 1:30 - 9:00 pm
Austrian Cultural Forum (ACF)
11 East 52nd Street New York, NY 10022
With: Ted Byfield, Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald-Crowley, Claire Pentecost, Peter Lamborn Wilson
Moderators: Konrad Becker, Jim Fleming
Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish objects, what collective and collaborative practices are inventing new terrains and flows?
As information and communication technologies saturate our world, how is art giving way to new forms of cultural symbolic manipulation?
Can we identify new models to replace the auteur and the artwork? If so, where do they come from and what might that say about the future of critical practices?
What new kinds of “virtual” spaces are opening up for cultural practice in electronic media? As “old media” begin to collapse under the pressures of the virtual, what new media can we find?
How are didactic illustration and channeled dissidence giving way to new forms of surprise and intensity?
What strategies elude the creative industries' seemingly infinite appetite for things radical? Are there any strategies that can elude being reduced to styles in the service of sales, or are critical practices doomed to play cat and mouse with the forces of consumerism?
Ted Byfield teaches at Parsons the New School for Design, is a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project of Yale Law School, and is co- moderator of the nettime-l mailing list.
Steven Kurtz is a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY, Buffalo and a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Formed in 1987, CAE's focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The collective has performed and produced a wide variety of projects for an international audience at diverse venues ranging from the street, to the museum, to the Internet. CAE has also written six books on various aspects of cultural resistance.
Amanda McDonald Crowley is a cultural worker, curator and facilitator who specializes in creating new media and contemporary art events and programs that encourage cross-disciplinary practice, collaboration and exchange. Executive Director of Eybeam a leading not-for-profit art and technology center she moved to New York in October 2005, relocating from her native Australia where she had been based while working nationally and throughout Europe and Asia.
Claire Pentecost is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the last four years, with Brian Holmes and New York's 16 Beaver, she has co-organized Continental Drift, a series of seminars about social, theoretical and aesthetic responses to the changing geopolitical order
www.publicamateur.wordpress.com,
www.clairepentecost.org
Peter Lamborn Wilson, also known by the pen name Hakim Bey, is an American political writer, essayist, and poet, known for first proposing the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), based on a historical review of pirate utopias.
Konrad Becker is an author, artist and producer in the field of culture and information technology. Director and co-founder of the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0 and of Public Netbase from 1994 to 2006, he initiated World-Information.Org, a cultural intelligence agency. Publications include: Strategic Reality Dictionary (2009) and Tactical Reality Dictionary (2002).
www.t0.or.at, world-information.org, global-security-alliance.com
Jim Fleming is an editor and the publisher of Autonomedia in New York City.
