Visions Video Podcast looks at how a team of University of Melbourne researchers harness the power of popular music and dance to test how big screens erected in public spaces can create a sense of connectivity between disparate communities.
Last week we went to the launch of Prof Nikos Papastergiadis' new book Cosmopolitanism and Culture at the Greek Community Centre in Melbourne. Check out the launch and speeches by Max Delaney (Director, Monash University Museum of Art) and David Pledger (Director, Not Yet It’s Difficult) on youtube!
This new publication examines how the images of the terrorist and the refugee, by being dispersed across almost all aspects of social life, have resulted in the production of ‘ambient fears’, and it explores the role of artists in reclaiming the conditions of hospitality. Since 9/11 contemporary artists have confronted the issues of globalization by creating situations in which strangers can enter into dialogue with each other, collaborating with diverse networks to forms new platforms for global knowledge. Such knowledge does not depend upon the old model of establishing a supposedly objective and therefore universal framework, but on the capacity to recognize, and mutually negotiate, situated differences. From artworks that incorporate new media techniques to collective activism Papastergiadis claims that there is a new cosmopolitan imaginary that challenges the conventional divide between art and politics. Through the analysis of artistic practices across the globe this book extends the debates on culture and cosmopolitanism from the ethics of living with strangers to the aesthetics of imagining alternative visions of the world. Polity Press describes it as a work of “essential reading for students and scholars in sociology and cultural studies and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the changing forms of art and culture in our contemporary global age.”
Includes key note lecture ‘Anti- Materialist Materialisms’, Jan Verwoert, initially presented Friday 2nd March 2012 at the Adelaide Festival Center:
“It’s not about what you believe, it’s about what gets you there,” argued Aleister Crowley, voicing the pragmatic spirit at the heart of spiritual practices. “Occultists are practical people,” joked Adorno, mocking the modern infatuation with mystery cults as a need to fabricate higher reasons for mundane pursuits. How could we articulate the ethos of a practice that involves both the rejection of a nostalgia for cultic order and a dedication to the mad joy of activating multiple (socio-cosmo-eroto-politco-aesthetic) relations in the making, thinking and exchanging of magical things?
LSTPS researcher Cecelia Cmeilewski recently participated in the 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Istanbul, September 2011. We asked: can recently ‘created’ public spaces become places of civic engagement – can they become a transnational ‘campo’? The hypothesis being tested is that real-time, interactive artwork presented between nations on large public screens can have a positive impact on how we engage with one other and, in a broader sense, affect our civic lives.
