Hi all,
Thanks Pier Luigi for understanding and giving us participant at the TTT conference in corfu a bit of time to recollect our thoughts. Actually, the conference was quite intense and gave me interesting food for thought, especially in its strange lack of connectivity, which I suspect is due to a mix of being on an island, dealing with old infrastructures and old building and maybe (but just maybe) the vampiric presence of a huge crowd of tourists sucking the hell out of the little bandwidth available.
Since this is a discussion on the new and history, and cultural/digital heritage, and science-art contribution, let me indulge for a second in the above situation and connnect it to some ideas I have read about in the previous posts (pardon me if I don't mention anybody, I am just speaking in general).
What I observed in our lack of connectivity was an extraordinary effort to find other ways around the absence of connectivity. I found myself roaming around and discovering spaces that I would have never visited, had I chosen to rely on my device. Interestingly, the conference showed us ways to connect art and science to rediscover and appreciate the cultural/natural heritage of the island (of course among other things. And of course, while this was not the main purpose, it still resonates with some of our discussions so far). For instance, the workshops incorporated and blended marine creatures, sea water, greek language and mythology that not only provided useful instructional scientific knowledge for artists and scholars, but also shed some light on the venue, turning out to be an extremely rich interdisciplinary exploration where new, old, make-shift technologies and DIY science combined quite harmoniously (interesting take on DIY lab column using a rock stand) .
I don't remember who, but I think several people mentioned Gibson's novels and defined them as "dystopian" . When I read gibson, I found myself being both repulsed AND attracted by these scenarios: there is something in those places that are very disturbing, but that happens when we look at them through the economics lens (as scenarios produced by extreme capitalist speculations, corporate rules etc...), but how about the strange relationships that occur in the novels, what about the new landscapes that are created as a product of, but also as a reaction or as a surviving strategy against those economic orders?
That very messy scenario is not all to discard and constitutes a complex cluster of meanings and relationships that I believe is worth examining further. Then the question is not whether or not we want that scenario to happen, but does it teach us anything ?
I am curious to hear form all of you, but also from those who were at the conference (most of whom I didn't meet, strange eh?)
All the best
Roberta
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