Presentation and Discussion with visiting researchers Juan Martín Prada (University of Cadiz) and Remedios Zafra (University of Sevilla).
Monday 26 September
3-5pm
LSBU, room K-302 in Keyworth Centre
This event is open for PhD and Master students, researchers and other interested people.
As part of ACI and CSNI, Spanish researchers Juan Martín Prada (University of Cadiz) and Remedios Zafra (University of Sevilla) have been conducting research in the past four months on art, media and the Web. During this afternoon they will present their findings and also discuss their previous research.
Remedios Zafra (writer and professor of Art and Digital Culture at the University of Seville):
Within the contemporary primacy of seeing via screens, experience is increasingly sustained within logics that dissolve old forms of collectivity and quantitatively condition new regimes of value and recognition of the other. In her most recent book Eyes and Capital, (Ojos y capital, 2015) Zafra suggests that the system becomes perverted setting in play two substantial gains: power over technological management of visibility as a guarantee of existence and value (eyes as a new currency); and involvement in what we deliver up in the networks, more or less consciously, contributing to new forms of domination and colonization of the gaze. And, although the inequality of the “non-seen”, of the excluded and non-conformists, permits today an appropriation of the net to bring into view zones of shadow and of the precariousness of what has traditionally remained outside the frame, this also shows up the illusion of a net-culture where the machine and its mechanisms have been made “invisible” to us through their ever-presentness and excess.
Juan Martín Prada (professor at the Universidad de Cádiz and director of the platform Inclusiva-net at Medialab-Prado in Madrid) :
Since the start of the 21st century, a series of mass participation and inter-relation dynamics have become widespread, based on countless social networks, blogs and vast collective repositories of files shared daily by millions of people. A large number of artists have undertaken a critical exploration of these new social dynamics and their enabling technologies, carrying out their creative investigations and actions within these new reference contexts. Juan Martín Prada’s recent research offers analysis and descriptions of this “second era” in the relation between artistic practices and the Internet, detailed studies of current net art (blog-art, interventions in social networks and metaverses, networked performances, installations connected to the Web, and so on) and also of artistic manifestations which are not online works as such but are “about” the Internet in any of its aesthetic, technical, linguistic, political or economic dimensions, via numerous media (video, still images, performance art, etc.).
For more information about Juan Martín Prada and Remedios Zafra and their practices see their respective websites:
http://www.juanmartinprada.net/
http://www.remedioszafra.net/english.html
Image: Christopher Baker, Hello World (2008).
Credit: Installation in the Nash Gallery, photo by Chris Houltberg