Disrupting Narratives

Leonardo Book Series authors Mark Amerika and Alexander Galloway will each give a keynote address for the "Disrupting Narratives" symposium, organized by Kate Southworth, in collaboration with the Tate Modern and iRes (Research in Interactive Art & Design) at University College Falmouth tomorrow at the Tate Modern Starr Auditorium.

This international symposium brings together some of the world's leading media artists, theorists and researchers to explore real-time interaction in electronic media. Over the last few years network theories have started to shape our thinking about social and cultural issues. This event seeks out artistic strategies and art forms that engage with these ideas. Other contributors include: Andrea Zapp, Kelli Dipple, Kate Rich and Paul Sermon.

Session 1 keynote address
Mark Amerika: Remixology, Hybridized Processes, and Postproduction Art: A Counternarrative

In this keynote address, artist and theorist Mark Amerika, author of META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, remixes personal narrative, philosophical inquiry, spontaneous theories, and cyberpunk fictions that investigate the emergence of digitally constructed identities, fictional personas, experiential metadata, narrative mythologies, and collaborative networks. Locating what he describes as the "postproduction artist" who engages with D-I-Y networking and alternative distribution schemes to build new models of audience development, Amerika will role-play the contemporary remixologist who is part VJ, part novelist, and part net artist, a made-up character in a book yet written, someone who uses the forms of new media not so much to counter spectacle in the media culture, but to create a counternarrative drift that moves away from the art object per se while investigating the depth of possibilities waiting to be discovered in the creative unconscious.

Session 2 keynote address
Alexander R Galloway: Counter-Protocol

In this keynote address, Alexander Galloway, author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, asks us to imagine an art exhibit of computer viruses. How would one curate such a show? Would the exhibition consist of documentation of known viruses, or of viruses roaming live? Would it be more like an archive or more like a zoo? Perhaps the exhibit would require the coordination of several museums, each with "honey pot" computers, sacrificial lambs offered up as attractor hosts for the contagion. A network would be required, the sole purpose of which would be to reiterate sequences of infection and replication. Now imagine an exhibit of a different sort: a museum exhibit dedicated to epidemics. Again, how would one curate an exhibit of disease? Would it include the actual virulent microbes themselves (in a sort of "microbial menagerie"), in addition to the documentation of epidemics in history? Would the epidemics have to be "historical" in order for them to qualify for exhibition? Or would two entirely different types of institutions be required: a museum of the present versus a museum of the past? In this talk Alexander Galloway explores a "counter-protocol" aesthetic and how it relates to the contemporary landscape of artmaking.

If you are in London, we hope you can make it to what is sure to be an interesting discussion.  The event begins at 10:00 am and runs through the day, ending with a cocktail reception at 6:00 pm Further details and a full schedule of talks can be found here. 

Comments

[Ronda Del Boccio, The Story Lady]

Interesting combination of art and story It would be an interesting conference. Thanks for sharing.
Ronda