I’ll be coming over to London to speak at Robot Futures: beyond the valley on the 1st of December. It’s a Lirec event at the Science Museum, with the associate editor of Wired, Olivia Solon; the artist Ghislaine Boddington from body>data>space; Matt Jones from BERG; and Peter McOwan from Queen Mary Westfield University.
I’ll very likely be speaking elsewhere whilst in Europe; follow me on Twitter – @skeuomorphology – for updates.
This year’s Virtual Futures 2.0’11 conference was astonishingly productive, and the results of the new ideas discussed and new collaborations formed are still reverberating around the net, the media and the conference circuit. Hopefully I’ll be able to speak about some of those results in the near future; in the meantime, much of the conference is now available on video.
My opening lecture at VF is below:
Shortly before the conference, Amy McLeod from the Warwick Knowledge Centre interviewed me, mainly about skeuomorphs (the topic of the book I’m writing at present): the podcast of that interview is available here.
There was a lot more talk of skeuomorphs in my live chat, ‘Understanding the Virtual’, following the conference; you can read a somewhat truncated and edited-down transcript here. The actual event was invaded and eventually DoSed by 4chan, the guys who hacked Sarah Palin’s emails… it was quite an honour to get 4channed, but the real transcript is unprintable.
Rhizome.org picked up on the skeuomorph meme and published another version: Dan O’Hara on Skeuomorphs, JG Ballard, Transhumanism, and the “eradication of individual identity.
And archive video from the 1995 Virtual Futures conference is steadily being digitized and placed on the VF Vimeo channel: below is an interview conducted with me recently, which includes a large chunk of the archive footage of Stelarc’s legendary 1995 performance, in which I’m bobbing around in the background with an orange mohican, trying to fix the sound levels, whilst Stelarc waves his third arm about menacingly…
On the 31st of August, I’ll be speaking at Coloquio Deleuze & Guattari: Filosofia Prática about Deleuze, diagrams, and art brut. The event’s held at the Palacio Gustavo Capanema in Rio de Janeiro, and runs from the 30th of August to the 2nd of September; it’s preceded by three days of film screenings, music, dance, and performances, from the 25th to the 28th of August. The full programme is available via the link above.
I’ll no doubt also be talking about the Deleuze & Guattari Concordance, which is grinding slowly forwards, and it’ll be hard to avoid talking about skeuomorphology, as I’m currently living in Rio in order to write a book about skeuomorphism and the role it plays in the evolution of style.
The speakers list and programme for Virtual Futures 2.0’11, to be held at Warwick University on the 18th and 19th of June, have been released. I’ll be there giving the opening plenary, talking about “Non-Human Agencies: A Skeuomorphological Account”.
It’s a great line-up: Stelarc returns, as do Rachel Armstrong, Ian Stewart, Jim Flint, Mark Fisher, Diane Gromala, Sue Thomas, Pat Cadigan, Richard Barbrook, Nick Fox, Martyn Amos, and o(rphan)d(rift>); plus Kevin Warwick, Sue Golding, Andy Miah, Alan Chalmers, Steve Fuller, Jeremy Wyatt… No Hakim Bey this time, though. Registration is now live.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote in the TLS that the rate of social change was itself accelerating. This year, I find myself the victim of my own prophecy.
At Warwick University on the 18-19 June, an event resurrecting Virtual Futures, Virtual Futures 2.0’11, takes place, organized by Luke Robert Mason, who’s doing his research thesis on the influence the conference had upon philosophy, technology, and culture, and investigating the ways in which VF led to modern synthetic biology, living architecture, and transhumanism.
It’s both extremely flattering and mindsplittingly frightening for a jobbing academic to find his activities of a mere fifteen years ago the subject of new research and conferences. I seem to be becoming-historical, as Deleuze might have said.
Anyone who was at the original conferences is especially asked to get in touch with the organizer, Luke; the line-up of speakers already looks like TED to the power of n…
The Talking Heads event at l’Haute ecole d’art et de design, Geneve (Geneva University of Art and Design) takes place this Wednesday at 7pm. I’ll be in Deleuze-inflected conversation with Francois Roche. Click on the image above for the poster.
On the 2nd of March I’ll be at l’Haute ecole d’art et de design, Geneve (Geneva University of Art and Design), as Francois Roche‘s special guest. He’ll be speaking about “Speculations, Fictions, Here & Now / Skyzoid machines & Ecosophical apparatuses”, and I’ll also speak separately, and/or we’ll engage in dialogue: more details soon. It’s part of a public lecture series, and all are welcome.
In September, on the 29 and 30th, I’ll be speaking (with Toni Negri, Rupert Soar, Jean Didier Vincent, Francois Jouve, John Holland, and Greg Lynn) at the University of South California on the topic of mind and machine. There’s no programme yet, but I’ll place a copy here when it becomes available
The event is interdisciplinary, and involves neurobiologists, mathematicians, architects, and philosophers. It’s organized by François Roche, whose work as an architect using Deleuze is absolutely compelling.
The new volume of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui is now out, available on Amazon; it contains my essay ‘The Metronome of Consciousness’.
The programme is now available for the Morphomata symposium, ‘Creativity of Finding: Figurations of the Quotation’. It runs from the 3 – 5 November 2010 at the University of Cologne. I’ll be speaking on Friday the 5th about “Skeuomorphology and the Evolution of Literary Quotation”.
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