CONFERENCE DAY 2. – The Technological Unconscious as a Medium

International interdisciplinary conference
November 16–17, 2012

The showpiece event of the educational program of the SOFT CONTROL project will be an international conference involving theoreticians and artists from Europe, USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Russia and Singapore, to be held 16–17 November 2012. Conference participants invited include recognised experts in the field of contemporary art and new technologies, famous artists and philosophers. The conference will place special emphasis on the presentation of new strategies in contemporary technological art and education in the field, as well as practical presentations. 2-day conference consists of 2 thematic sections: “Technological Matter and the New State of the Living” and “The Technological Unconscious as a Medium”. A publication forthcoming in 2013 will sum up the project.

DAY 2: The Technological Unconscious as a Medium
Date: Saturday, November 17 (2.00 p.m. – 8.00 p.m.)
Location: Portal – Valvazorjeva 40, Maribor, Slovenia
Moderator: Dr. Prof. Dmitry Galkin, Tomsk State University, Russia

The thematic section “The Technological Unconscious as a Medium” is devoted to anthropocentric variants of technological development. Examining the technological unconscious as a medium, i.e., as a form and generative principle of a whole new generation of ideas, the discussion participants raise the question of how the language that constructs and describes the world of technologies forms. Which discourses of the technological unconscious can be singled out today, and which will it be essential to reconstruct tomorrow? Is the artist capable of reinventing and rewriting the very foundations of the technology myth? Well-known practicians and theoreticians of contemporary art will talk about different aspects of the creation of new forms and new identities.

Keynote speakers:
Dr Prof Roy Ascott, Plymouth University, United Kingdom
Dr Prof Erkki Huhtamo, University of California Los Angeles, USA