Public Symposium:
Arts and Theories in the Post-Media Era

Media ecology is dramatically changing our understanding and perception of the world and the development of digital technology and its modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs: shifts from mass media to social media, from analogue to digital and from cultural to creative industries, is transforming society, economy, culture, the body and its environment. We may call our age the ‘Post-Media’ period following the argument posed by Felix Guattari and others.

How, then are arts and culture developing in relation to new media? How should we develop new theories to analyze contemporary media? In this public symposium, we will discuss media, arts and culture and theoretical development in the Post-Media, by inviting Dr. Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London and leading figure in the field of software studies and Dr. Olga Goriunova, Reader and Director of Postgraduate Research at the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, a theorist of digital art and culture and curator.

* No booking required. The symposium will be delivered in English and Japanese with translation.
* This symposium is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 17H02587.
* There will be another lecture by Matthew Fuller on July 14, 2017.

Date: Saturday, July 15, 2017
Time: 13:00～17:40
Venue: Lecture Room 5-109, Department of Music, Ueno Campus, Tokyo University of the Arts

Time Table:

13:00-13:10
Opening Remarks:Prof. Yoshitaka MŌRI［Tokyo University of the Arts］

13:10-15:00
Introduction: Towards New Media Theories:
Prof. Mamoru ITO［Waseda University］
Keynote Speech:Prof. Matthew FULLER［University of London, Goldsmiths

15:00-15:30 Discussion
Discussant: Yoshitaka MŌRI［Tokyo University of the Arts］
Chair: Dr. Shinji OYAMA［Ritsumeikan University］

15:30-16:00 Break

16:00-17:30 Symposium: Arts and Theory in the Post-Media Era
Speaker: Dr. Olga Goriunova［University of London, Royal Holloway］
Dr. Tomoko Shimizu [Tsukuba University] Chair: Prof. Kazunori Mizushima [Osaka Sangyo University]

Keynote Speech Abstract:
Matthew FULLER

“Black Sites and Transparency layers”
Transparency is extolled as a virtue, and one specifically crystallised in the way in which computer interfaces compose relations between users, data, and processes.  This lecture sets out a brief genealogy of transparency in user interfaces and examines the way in which notions of transparency drawn from computational sources provide a means for a more general set of refrains in contemporary architecture, economics, politics, conflict and art.  Coupled with the question of transparency is of course that of what is hidden from view or occluded.  How the two states combine to texture contemporary life has a fundamentally computational dimension to it that this lecture will attempt to address by looking at new cultural objects such as “flat design” and recent silicon valley architecture.

Profile:
Matthew FULLER
Fuller is the author of How to be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software (Polity). Other titles include Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press), Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software and Elephant & Castle (both Autonomedia). With Andrew Goffey he is co-author of Evil Media (MIT Press). How to Sleep: In Art, Biology and Culture (Bloomsbury) is to be published in 2018. He has worked in and with artists groups such as I/O/D, Mongrel and YoHa. Fuller is an editor of books including Software Studies: A Lexicon (MIT Press), and is a co-editor of the journal Computational Culture (http://www.computationalculture.net). He is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Talk Abstract:
Olga GORIUNOVA

“Data Subjects”
In this talk I will explore how we manage our subjectivities as they become data-based, processed and arranged by algorithms. Subjectivities we craftfully perform online connect in obscure ways to the data subjects aggregated from our data largely outside our knowledge and used on us. Whether the connections between our subjectivities, digital performances and data subjects are indexical, metaphorical, logical or poetic is an open question. I will illustrate my talk with art projects that pose this question in interesting ways.

Profile:
Olga GORIUNOVA
Olga Goriunova is Reader and Director of Postgraduate Research at the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (Routledge, 2012), editor of Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (Bloomsbury, 2014) and co-editor, with Alexei Shulgin, of Readme. Software Art and Cultures (University of Aarhus Press, 2004). She is a co-founder and co-editor of Computational Culture, A Journal of Software Studies(computationalculture.net). She has also worked as a curator, co-organizing, among other, four Readme, software art festivals (2001-05), Runme.org software art repository and curating a series of exhibitions Fun and Software ( 2010-11). In 2015, she was a Fellow at the University of Leuphana’s Digital Cultures Research Lab. In 2014-16 she was part of the Posthumanities International Network (funded by the Swedish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences) and member of the Visual Social Media Lab, working on the project Picturing the Social: transforming our understanding of images in social media and Big Data research (funded by Economic and Social Research Council, UK). She is currently working on a monograph on digital subjects.

Organized by
Post Media Research Network (PMRN)
Yoshitaka Mouri Lab, Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Global Arts

Inquiry:
Faculty Room, Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
Office Hours (Ueno): 10:00-19:00 (Mon, Thu, Fri)
Tel (Ueno): ＋81-(0)50-5525-2725
Office Hours (Senju): 10:00～19:00 (Tue, Wed)
Tel (Senju): ＋81-(0)50-5525-2732
info-ga(at)ml.geidai.ac.jp