15 July 2022: 10.00-17.00, Reading School of Art, Whiteknights Campus, Reading.
Notes From the Subsurface selected for Imagining Tomorrow Today: Examining the promise of Art/Technology/Science collaboration, Reading School of Art.
I will be screening the film alongside a performative lecture which unpacks its themes.
“‘The future’, Berardi writes, ‘is not a natural dimension of the mind. It is a modality of projection and imagination, a feature of expectation and attention, and its modalities and features change with the changing of cultures.’”
This year’s symposium is concentrated on the transdisciplinary approach to art, technology, and science, where we will be examining the benefits and the contribution of the collaboration between the disciplines to society and environment.
We will focus on the following questions:
How does the relationship between contemporary art and the sciences help us to imagine the future? To locate new practices onto what Frederic Jameson would describe as ‘cognitive mapping’, that is, “the means to make our world intelligible to ourselves through a situational understanding of our position”?
Can art collaborate with new technologies to affect long-term changes, take an active role in shaping the future, and how does that manifest?
Can we, as artists, debate Nick Srnicek’s claims that, “for the new aesthetics to be of lasting significance, it needs to push in a different direction beyond just the weird”?