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Symposium:

• ISEA2011: 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

• Hybrid Cultures

• Untitled

• Kerstin Mey
• Yvonne Spielmann

Venue(s):

• Sabanci Center, Istanbul, Turkey

• Chair Per­sons: Ker­stin Mey & Yvonne Spiel­mann
  Pre­sen­ters: Ryszard Kluszczyn­ski & Sabine Fabo

  Hy­brid cul­tures are phe­nom­ena of es­sen­tial con­nec­tions in the pre­sent. They emerge from di­verse and com­plex in­flu­ences. Hy­brid cul­tures are merg­ers that com­bine past and pre­sent, local and translo­cal, space and place and technoscape. Hy­brid­ity is ex­pressed in var­i­ous cul­tural con­texts and in the in-be­tween spaces of arts, media, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. Under the sign of the dig­i­tal and the global, hy­brid­ity con­notes a cul­tural man­i­fes­ta­tion of mul­ti­ple ap­pear­ances, as in cy­ber­space and mul­ti­ple selves. We apply the term hy­brid cul­tures to the con­tem­po­rary in­ter-con­nect­ed­ness that de­rives from the tech­no­log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of merg­ing vir­tual worlds and real life ex­pe­ri­ence and to art prac­tices that in­sti­gate cre­ative in(ter)ven­tion into our global media pre­sent, as well as to sci­en­tific re­search that aims to blur the bound­aries be­tween human and ma­chine,  sci­ence and sci­ence fic­tion. In ap­ply­ing the term hy­brid cul­tures, we pro­pose to dis­cuss a crit­i­cal con­cept of hy­brid­ity that in­ter-re­lates the de­bates and prac­tices of the in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary do­mains of media, cul­tural and aes­thetic the­o­ries.  The scrutiny of dig­i­tal cul­tures as fields of hy­brid in­ter­ac­tion al­lows us to more closely ex­am­ine the cul­tur­ally mixed ex­per­tises that com­bine dif­fer­ent as­pects of the­ory and prac­tice at work, in lo­cally pro­duced and glob­ally dis­trib­uted media forms, and in the con­ver­gence of net­work-based sci­ence and knowl­edge tech­nolo­gies, with cre­ative art prac­tices.  As a start­ing point, we wish to scru­ti­nise the crit­i­cal stance of hy­brid cul­tures: what are the cul­tural ef­fects of hy­brid prac­tices in arts and media, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy? What kind of fu­sion can pro­mote in­ter-me­dial and in­ter-cul­tural un­der­stand­ing? How can hy­brid cul­tures re­sist cor­po­rate com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion? How can they ben­e­fit from transna­tional, tran­scul­tural, and translo­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion? With re­gard to the plu­ral­ity of media and cul­tures that are promi­nently dis­cussed as hy­brid, the panel en­cour­ages crit­i­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tion of:

  1. the place of the artist, the cul­tural critic, the com­mu­ni­ca­tor and me­di­a­tor of tech­no­log­i­cal change
  2. new forms of col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween dis­ci­plines and cul­tures
  3. the ex­ten­sion of the con­cept of hy­brid­ity across bor­ders with­out los­ing its iden­tity of cre­ative in­ter­ven­tion into the here and now

  Ques­tions the panel will raise: How much mul­ti­plic­ity and plu­ral­ity do we want and need in glob­ally net­worked com­mu­ni­ca­tion? And what kind of speci­ficity and dif­fer­ence in the midst of blur­ring is nec­es­sary for the iden­tity for­ma­tion of our cul­tures, arts, and sci­ences? How are com­plex re­la­tion­ships be­tween arts and sci­ences and tech­nolo­gies cre­at­ing a new vi­sion of hy­brid cul­tures?

Category:

• Panel