Re-rooting Digital Culture - Media Art Ecologies. ISEA 2011.

The ideas for this in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary panel will ex­plore the re­la­tion­ship be­tween dig­i­tal cul­ture and cli­mate change, de­vel­op­ing themes adopted in grass-roots, emerg­ing and es­tab­lished prac­tices in art, de­sign, ac­tivism and sci­ence.
Chair Per­son: Ruth Cat­low
Pre­sen­ters:
Helen Var­ley Jamieson
Michel Bauwens
Paula Crutchlow
Over the last decade the aware­ness of an­thro­pogenic cli­mate change has emerged in par­al­lel with hy­per-con­nec­tive dig­i­tal net­works. In the con­text of en­vi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic col­lapse peo­ple around the world are seek­ing al­ter­na­tive vi­sions of pros­per­ity and sus­tain­able ways of liv­ing.
While the legacy of the car­bon fu­eled In­dus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion plays it­self out, we find our­selves grap­pling with ques­tions about the fu­ture im­pli­ca­tions of fast-evolv­ing global dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture. By their very na­ture the new tools, net­works and be­hav­iours of pro­duc­tiv­ity, ex­change and co­op­er­a­tion be­tween hu­mans and ma­chines grow and de­velop at an ac­cel­er­ated rate. The rhetoric, aes­thet­ics, tech­nics and as­so­ci­ated eth­i­cal ques­tions of dig­i­tal cul­ture are fun­da­men­tally chang­ing so­cial re­la­tions as well as the na­ture of our ma­te­r­ial ex­is­tence.
The ideas for this in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary panel have grown out of Fur­ther­field's Media Art Ecolo­gies pro­gramme and will ex­plore the re­la­tion­ship be­tween dig­i­tal cul­ture and cli­mate change, de­vel­op­ing themes adopted in grass-roots, emerg­ing and es­tab­lished prac­tices in art, de­sign, ac­tivism and sci­ence.
Pan­elists are artists and ac­tivists whose prac­tices ad­dress the in­ter­re­la­tion of tech­no­log­i­cal and nat­ural processes: be­ings and things, in­di­vid­u­als and mul­ti­tudes, mat­ter and pat­terns. They take an eco­log­i­cal ap­proach that chal­lenges growth eco­nom­ics and techno-con­sumerism and at­tends to the na­ture of co-evolv­ing, in­ter­de­pen­dent en­ti­ties and con­di­tions; they they ac­ti­vate net­works (dig­i­tal, so­cial, phys­i­cal) to work with eco­log­i­cal themes and Free and Open processes.
Furtherfield
www.furtherfield.org