Ⓥ 8.2 Memory
Tracks
Track 2
Wednesday, June 26, 2024 |
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM |
Plaza P6 |
Overview
This session will be livestreamed from Brisbane for virtual delegates
Speaker
Mr John Tonkin
The University of Sydney
P: Vertigo and Emptiness in the Memory Palace
1:30 PM - 2:15 PMAbstract
This panel will explore potential intersections of mixed reality and memory. It is presented by members of a research group that was formed in 2023: a digital cultures theorist (Chris Chesher), a cognitive philosopher (John Sutton) and two art-ists (Robyn Backen and John Tonkin). Speakers will engage with a range of object-based and mixed reality case studies to question the connection between space and memory. How does the presence of the body contribute to these experiences? What is the relationship between individual and collective rec-ollections? How do these experiences offer new possibilities to engage with acts of remembering and forgetting?
Biography
John Tonkin has been working with media art since 1985. His broad interests have grown out of a long-term interest in the sciences and are investigations into our attempts to make sense of the world. He is currently extending his research to explore the possibilities and problematics of VR technologies. John lectures in contemporary art at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney.
Ms Robyn Backen
Senior Lecturer
The Univerity of Sydney
Panelist
Biography
Robyn Backen is a Senior lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts and is an artist whose work makes connections between art, science and philosophy. Her work is not bound by medium or scale, with large public commissions contrasting against smaller sound and light works. Her constructions and computer-generated systems often examine the cultural context of the spaces they inhabit. Drawing upon research into technology and materials, investigating patterns and systems within her practice, like language, nature, and remembering.
Dr Chris Chesher
Senior Lecturer In Digital Cultures
The University of Sydney
Panelist
Biography
Dr Chris Chesher is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney. He co-founded the Digital Cultures program and the Master of Digital Communication and Culture. Holding a PhD from Macquarie University, his transdisciplinary approach bridges digital cultures, media, and cultural studies with a broad spectrum of fields, including philosophy of technology, science studies, games studies, internet studies, sociology of technology, human-computer interaction, social and cultural robotics, and digital humanities.
Professor John Sutton
Emeritus Professor
Macquarie University
Panelist
Biography
Professor John Sutton is a cognitive philosopher and holds the position of Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. His interdisciplinary research spans philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and cognitive humanities, exploring topics like autobiographical memory, embodied memory, and cognitive history. Currently, he is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris, contributing to the 'Brain, Culture, and Society' program: 'City Design and the Brain: a dialogue between architecture and neuroscience.'
Associate Professor Rhonda Holberton
San José State University
P: The Tiger's Leap: Re-authorship and the Digital Archive
2:15 PM - 3:00 PMAbstract
Panelists will discuss their roles in a collaborative inter-institutional project funded by the Knight Foundation to reauthor artist projects that are in danger of becoming uninhabitable due to platform rot. Invited artists work with a team of digital archivists from San Jose State University under the supervision of Vanessa Chang and students in the CADRE Media Lab at San Jose State University to reauthor works using several methods being developed under the guidance of Professor Rhonda Holberton.
The panel will offer perspectives on collections management, artist contracts, and best practices for reauthoring with insights from the reauthoring process of 3 projects: 1) Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Difference Engine #3, 2) Tamiko Thiel & Zara Houshmand’s Beyond Manzanar 3) Christine Tamblyn’s She Loves It, She Loves it Not.
Biography
Rhonda Holberton utilizes technology as a medium to reconcile the biological body with geologic time, revealing their material and environmental impacts both on individual entities and on a planetary scale. Her subtle animations, digital interventions, sculptures and installation pieces move between the material and the immaterial, the authentic and synthetic, and pay special attention to the phenomenology of climate change in order to imagine ways we might collectively write more inclusive rules for digital platforms. Holberton has exhibited widely, including at RMIT Gallery (Melbourne); La Becque | Résidences d’artistes (La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland); FIFI Projects (Mexico City); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (San José) XXX’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney, SFMOMA, and the McEvoy Foundation. She holds a MFA from Stanford University and is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at San José State University.
Vanessa Chang
Director of Programs
Leonardo ISAST
Panelist
Biography
As a curator, writer and educator, Vanessa Chang builds communities and conversations about art, technology and human bodies. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo/ISAST. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where she was a Geballe Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Most recently, she curated Recoding CripTech at SOMArts Cultural Center, Intersections at the Leonardo Convening at Fort Mason Center for the Arts, and Artobots, a CODAME festival of art, automation and artificial intelligence. She has appeared on NPR’s On the Media and State of the Art, and her curatorial work has been profiled in such venues as Art in America and KQED Arts. Her writing has been published in Wired, Slate, Noema, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Visual Culture, and Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, among other venues.
Ms Elvia Arroyo Ramirez
Digital Archivist
University Of California, Irvine
Panelist
Biography
Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez is the Digital Archivist for University Archives at University of California, Irvine. She holds a BA from UCLA and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the co-editor of the special issue on “Radical Empathy in Archival Practice” in the Journal for Critical Library and Information Studies (JCLIS). Her practice and scholarship are grounded in a feminist ethic of care and works to expose and repair archival practices rooted in systemic biases that perpetuate harm to Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and other marginalized communities.
Session chair
Raivo Kelomees
Estonian Academy of Arts
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