Digital Echoes: (Re)Imagining the Past, (Re)Inventing the Future

Description

Digital Echoes: (Re)Imagining the Past, (Re)Inventing the Future

Co-Organised event with: Prof. Sarah Whatley and Dr. Hetty Blades. For the 6th edition of the Digital Echoes Symposium, we focus on participation as one of the most prominent legacies of the digital, in particular how it invokes processes of collectivity, democratisation and decentring. We consider participation as a process, a framework for access and production, but also increasingly becoming a philosophy and a culture. In response to this theme, we invite researchers and practitioners in dance, the arts and the humanities, to reflect on practices of collecting, archiving and safekeeping, how these traces are being used to configure new ways of imagining futures, and how such practices highlight the legacy of the digital on humanistic and artistic disciplines. As the title suggests, we invite a reflective and critical examination of digital archival practices, with a focus on dance and neighbouring art forms. We look at the future through a frame of making, or crafting, which evokes discourses on materiality and immateriality, tangible and intangible, conversion and representation. Through representation in digital formats ephemeral performative acts gain tangible qualities. Yet tangibility does not mean fixation; as digital representations are manipulated, stored, accessed, retrieved and re-used they are simultaneously objectified and re-formed, as they are increasingly used and re-used in different formats and in new contexts. We invite contributions that consider the impacts of public/user participation on archival practice and research, and their legacy for the future.

Period	4 Mar 2016
Event type	Conference
Location	Coventry, United Kingdom