Held on 1 May from 10.00 to 17.30.
The symposium aims to investigate the local tensions around the ways in which artists and commentators respond to global processes, and the language and strategies they employ to do so. How does contemporary artistic practice respond to these tensions, especially when using or reflecting the use of network technologies?
Do artists simply respond using the same fashionable rhetoric as the system they seek to question? What chance does networked resistance have of being resistant in such a scenario? What models are there left to aspire to?
The symposium aims to excavate these conceptual tensions and paradoxes surrounding artists' critical use of technologies and their use of the predominant metaphors of networked global communications.
Are new metaphors required to describe contemporary cultural practices, thus defying orthodox distinctions, aiming to explore the 'micropolitics of global media';– or do old ones still remain pertinent? In other words, how can digital technologies that inherently serve to support the process of globalisation be used to promote and maintain what is locally specific, culturally and socially heterogeneous?
All speakers will address these ideas in terms of the viability of 'local' resistant networks.