Sketching the future: new research institute will explore the frontiers of digital technology

Playing games inside holograms… seeing art that you can feel and hear too… using cyborg technology to control what we physically experience… these are just some of the things we will all be able to do in the future.

Now an institute is being established to study how digital technology – which has given us the internet and the ipod, hip-hop and text messaging – is affecting the way we live.

The Institute for the Converging Arts & Sciences at the University of Greenwich will be launched with an international symposium, Of Clouds and Clocks: When Art Met the Web Sciences, on 16 and 17 October.

Professor Johnny Golding, Director of the Institute, says: “Society is facing a paradigm shift because of the tremendous advances in web sciences and communication technologies. Science is changing the way we make art and think about ourselves – information technology is the platform and medium from which art and ideas are being created.”

“Virtual reality, three-dimensional holograms, electronic music – it is like operating in a new dimension, that goes beyond the material base we have been used to.”

Dame Wendy Hall, the leading computer scientist who founded the Web Sciences Research Initiative with Sir Tim Berners Lee (inventor of the world wide web) is the symposium’s keynote speaker. She will be joined by 24 other speaker/provocateurs in two days of roundtable discussion with presentations and performances including the compositional atonal works of composer and physicist Joel Ryan.

Tessa Blackstone, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, opens the symposium which will be live streamed with a web-screened interactive environment.

Editors’ notes:

Launch of the Institute for the Converging Arts & Sciences

Of Clouds and Clocks: When Art Met the Web Sciences

· 9am Friday 16 to 6pm Saturday 17 October

· Council Chamber Room (Queen Anne Court Rm.163), University of Greenwich, Royal Naval College, Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9LS

· Admission is free, but as seating is limited, please reserve by emailing: ICAS@gre.ac.uk

Speakers include Arthur Kroker (Director and Critical Digital Arts Theorist, Pacific Centre for Technology, Art & Culture, Victoria); Matt Fuller (Reader, The David Gee Chair in Digital Arts, Goldsmiths), Caroline Arscott (Prof of 19thC British Art, the Courtauld Institute), Olga Kisseleva (NANOArtist, Plastik.Arts, Professor and artist, the Sorbonne), Dick Rijken (Director: STEIM) Beryl Graham (Curator, Archivist and Prof of New Media Art, Univ Sunderland) Masahiro Miwa and Nobuyasu Sakonda, composers/media artists on criticism of technology, shape-shifting and keyhole aesthetics (IAMAS and NUAS Japan) Joel Ryan (Composer & Physicist, STEIM), Norbert Finzsch (Historian, Univ of Cologne), Mary Bryson (Director, Centre for Cross-Faculty Education, Univ British Columbia), Art Clay (Composer/Artist and Mathematician, ETH, Zurich), Simon Biggs (Research Prof of Art, Edinburgh College of Art); Steve Gibson & Stefan Müller Arisona (software architects/sound-light composers, Centre for Creative Technologies, De Montfort University and ETH, Zurich), Fox Harrell (Director, ICE-lab studios on gaming, Georgia Tech), M. Michaela Hampf (Military Historian, the JFK Institute, Frei Univ of Berlin), Ecke Bonk (Designer, sign systems, ZKM Karlshrue), Pascal Brannan (Artist, London), Stephen Kennedy (Sonic Economies, Media Arts philosopher and DJ/composer, Univ Greenwich), Aya Walfaren (holographic interactivity and the strange 3d technologies, UBC), Maureen Thomas (Media Arts/Theatre Director, Cambridge) and Ted Hiebert (media-arts poet, philosopher and artist, Univ. of Washington).

 “A King Arthur’s table, promising to be intense, provocative, playful and extraordinary. Be there if you can.”

Professor Johnny Golding, Director of ICAS, and Chair of Philosophy in the Visual Arts & Communication Technologies at the University of Greenwich. She is a philosopherand artist whose research covers the intra-disciplinary discourses associated with the electronic arts, web sciences and communication technologies. Set out in terms of installation, performance, rolling-documentary, books, articles and aphoristic texts, her works address the various aspects of a post-metaphyical practice in terms of their mobile multi-media, cartographies and fractal dimensionalities. Her books include The 8 Technologies of Otherness; Games of Truth: A Blood Poetic in 7 part harmony; Honour; Dirty Theory: Aesthetics After Metaphyics (forthcoming). Her film work includes: Once Upon a Wormhole; I spy with my little eye; God is a Lobster (and other Forbidden bodies). Executive-Editor of the international journal Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics, she also works and publishes under the name of Sue Golding.

Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. One of the first computer scientists to undertake serious research in multimedia and hypermedia, she has been at its forefront ever since. The influence of her work has been significant in many areas including digital libraries, the development of the Semantic Web, and the emerging research discipline of Web Science. Her current research includes applications of the Semantic Web and exploring the interface between the life sciences and the physical sciences. She is a Founding Director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the world wide web, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative.

Through her leadership roles on national and international bodies, she has shattered many glass ceilings, readily deploying her position on numerous national and international bodies to promote the role of women in SET, and acting as an important role model for others. She helps shape science and engineering policy and education. She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year's Honours list, and is currently a member of the UK Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology.

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Hester Brown, Press Officer

University of Greenwich

Tel: 020 8331 7663

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