The Sixth International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture
DARK EDEN
6 – 8 November 2020
VIRTUAL & IN-PERSON
Location: Sydney
We are pleased to announce the conference keynotes:
Professor Barbara Bolt* – Director, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
Professor Laura U. Marks* – School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
Professor Timothy Morton* – Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University
*Live-streamed via video conference
The sixth Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference at the intersections of art, science and culture invites you to three stimulating days where acclaimed professionals including creative arts practitioners, curators, historians, critics and theorists explore transdisciplinary imaging relating to the theme of Dark Eden. Is the Dark Eden a Counter-Enlightenment? Is it a shadow zone, a spectral landscape, a cemetery or a zombieland? Is it the debris of an image culture, or does it provide the material for a new culture?
Eden was a mythical, bright paradise at the start of time—an original fullness of body and spirit, of image and substance, of nature and language—from which, so the myth goes, we have all been exiled for all of history. But, turning this story in reverse, what now might lie behind those closed gates of Eden, with its divine creator and caretaker absent, presumed dead? A garden gone to seed or a seething wilderness? An abandoned amusement park; a lost world? Or is it a derelict museum, shrouded in the darkness of disuse and of stagnant time?
This is not just idle speculation. The cultural movement and moment now dubbed simply but absolutely as “Contemporary” is defined by the networked saturation of images: fullness, dissemination and inundation of frictionless image production, image hacking, image consumption and image commerce on social media and in platform capitalism; of 24/7 crisis news and uncritical web influencers; of CCTV and drone surveillance; of massive multiplayer online gaming; of “deepfake” hoaxes and simulations that augment reality and contribute to the relentlessly cynical campaigning of our 21st century political twitter “newspeak”. Is not this cornucopia and unprecedented availability of mediated imagery a kind of Eden? If so, it is a dark Eden, metaphorically fertile as a forest that is so thick with its tentacular edicts that any light that penetrates cannot escape its web; or perhaps, that its mutated growth is now dependent on a black rather than bright light. Its darkness might be that of the pall of ash-filled smoke shrouding a burning continent.
The conference papers respond to this provocation in areas related to: visual arts, new media, cultural history and theory, curating, cinema and video, computer visualization, real-time imaging, scientific imaging and modelling, intelligent systems and image science. The aim of the conference is to bring together artists, theorists, scholars, scientists, historians and curators.
Papers may address the general topic from any angle (direct or oblique); however proposals should consider at least one of the following areas:
- Expanded image
- Remediated image
- Hypermediacy
- Expanded film
- Imaging science
- Computer vision
- Networked image
- Immersion
- Speculative realism
- The invisible, the subliminal, the inaudible or subaudial
- Infraworld
- Enlightenment and the post-truth era
- Augmented reality
- Artificial intelligence, or intelligent systems
- Material image
Conference Chair: Professor Paul Thomas, Art and Design, UNSW Sydney
Co-Chairs: Dr David Eastwood, Art and Design, UNSW Sydney | Dr Chelsea Lehmann, National Art School
Proceedings Chair: Dr Edward Colless, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
Image Paul Thomas Dark Eden 2020, acrylic on canvas 1545x1152mm