To­wards a Nat­ural His­tory of the Vir­tual Realms

Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats

• To­wards a Nat­ural His­tory of the Vir­tual Realms

• Andrew Burrell

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Panel: Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats

  A uni­fy­ing thread that runs through­out Bur­rell’s the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal re­search (which in­clude mixed re­al­ity and vir­tual art pro­jects) has been one of ex­plor­ing and search­ing for a po­ten­tial site of the self – and to dare to won­der if this site ex­ists at all. In his pre­sen­ta­tion he will focus on ob­ser­va­tions of the nat­ural his­tory of the phys­i­cal world and ask what a nat­ural his­tory of a hab­it­able vir­tual en­vi­ron­ment may be and how one may emerge as we move into this en­vi­ron­ment and make it our own, and in­deed how this may dif­fer from those of the real world. In doing so he will also ask how the post-hu­man self is start­ing to in­habit these spaces and how it will fit into these new ecolo­gies. The pre­sen­ta­tion will take the form of a po­etic jour­ney fo­cus­ing on the artist’s own phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cally per­ceived self. He will move from a poorly re­called past (as a per­sonal nar­ra­tive of his own his­tory) and into an imag­ined fu­ture – as vividly il­lus­trated and an­tic­i­pated through the artis­tic imag­i­na­tion – with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to his own cre­ative pro­jects and to the works of the Aus­tralian writer Greg Egan.

Category:

• Panel