Tag Archives: Social Change

Brave New World: the pill-popping, social media obsessed dystopia we live in

Dr Tony D. Sampson is reader in digital culture and communications in the School of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI), co-founder of Club Critical Theory and organiser of the Affect and Social Media conferences. His publications include ‘The Spam Book’ (Hampton Press, 2009) ‘Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks’ (Minnesota, 2012), ‘The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture’ (Minnesota, 2016) and ‘Affect and Social Media’ (2018).

The Search for a Brave New World Aesthetic

Jasmine Pradissitto describes herself as “a practising Quantum Artist and Creativity Warrior”, a “painter who sculpts with light and colour using the scientific knowledge accumulated over years of experience”, creating ‘holograms you can touch’. Forms inspired by nature, the human condition and scientific breakthroughs, are melted and reshaped from plastics into sculptures as a commentary on an ever increasingly Anthropocene world.

Current Wars and Conflicts

Cartography, methods of visualizing information, history, current events, satire and humor are some of the subjects that captivate Dan Mills. He began to incorporate maps into his work in the early 1990s while exploring the quincentennial of what is euphemistically referred to as The First Encounter. Since then, he has made series about history and colonization in painting/collages on large roll-down school maps that explore imperialism by creating an atlas reconfiguring the world, about loss in history through erasure and overpainting maps, and that use maps as a space to visualize data about wars and conflicts.

Earth video talks

Featuring – Zaria Forman: Drawings that show the beauty and fragility of Earth ; Al Gore: The Case for Optimism on Climate Change ; Satish Kumar: Soil, Soul and Society ; Sam ‘Ohu Gon III: Lessons from a thousand years of island sustainability ; Tega Brain: Eccentric Engineering: Thoughts for the Anthropocene ; and Francesco Sauro: Deep Under the Earth’s Surface, Discovering Beauty and Science.

Earth video blog link

Featuring – Zaria Forman: Drawings that show the beauty and fragility of Earth ; Al Gore: The Case for Optimism on Climate Change ; Satish Kumar: Soil, Soul and Society ; Sam ‘Ohu Gon III: Lessons from a thousand years of island sustainability ; Tega Brain: Eccentric Engineering: Thoughts for the Anthropocene ; and Francesco Sauro: Deep Under the Earth’s Surface, Discovering Beauty and Science.

CLIMARTE: ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017

CLIMARTE is a Melbourne-based organisation that produces, promotes, and facilitates arts events with an alliance of arts practitioners and organisations that advocate for immediate, effective, creative, and inspired action on climate change.

Following on from the successful 2015 inaugural event, ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2017 will take place across Melbourne and regional Victoria from 19 April until 14 May, providing a platform for the discussion of the challenges, opportunities, impacts, and solutions associated with climate change.

The Domestication of Plastic

Heather Davis is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University where she researches the ethology of plastic and its links to petrocapitalism. She is the co-editor (with Etienne Turpin) of ‘Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies’ (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and ‘Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada’ (MAWA/McGill Queen’s UP, forthcoming 2017).

Drawing is political?

‘Drawing is political?’, examines the ever changing context which determines the politics of how we might look at, see, and understand Drawings today. In doing so, discusses the contemporary relevance of the medium of Drawing, in the context of the volume and velocity by which we experience images digitally in contemporary western culture. A fundamental proposition considers whether ‘traditional’ Drawing approaches are merely an antidote to the digital world, or in fact, whether original and authentic drawn responses are now more important than ever?

The abject ‘Other’

“I am undertaking a critical genealogy of human displacement from the 19th century into late modernity, tracing the socio-political abjection through narratives of loss and movement. In this way I will look to connect my work with artists through the centuries who have depicted the abject ‘Other.'”

Caroline Burraway’s body of work aims to confront socio-cultural issues that lie at the core of modern society and with what lies hidden beneath in the everyday lived experience of the marginal individual and their relationship with the world they always already inhabit.

Schwarz Flaneur

Pogus Caesar’s photographs unravel the simplicity of the ordinary and the mundane giving us a glimpse into the lives of people he has encountered on his travels. ‘Schwarz Flaneur ‘ is named after the unguarded moments that Caesar so strives to capture. These images are signature to much of Caesar’s work and his dedication to Ilford HP5 black and white film and a vintage 1983 Canon Sure Shot camera. “Photographic essays allow much more freedom of expression and the ultimate surprise.”