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The University of Southampton
Winchester School of Art

Art, Labs and the Cold War - Professor Ryan Bishop Event

Professor Ryan Bishop
Time:
16:00 - 17:30
Date:
12 October 2016
Venue:
Harvard Suite (Room Number 3032), WSA

For more information regarding this event, please email John Armitage at J.Armitage@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

At present, in North America, there are over 100 programs and labs committed to collaborative experimentation in art and technology. This talk examines the current prominence of art and technology labs in the context of the resurgence of collaborative practice in the arts, not only between artists, but also among a wide range of cross-disciplinary groupings of designers, scientists, engineers, scholars and others. The push for collaboration in the arts is part of a recalibration of the meaning of 'research' as it is understood by arts practitioners, and among the legacies of institutional critique has been the expanded engagement of artists in a range of contexts that moves beyond galleries and museums and into, among other places, universities, businesses, science and tech labs and facilities. This talk draws on a number of related projects I am pursuing with various collaborators examining the reconfiguration of the avant-garde in the US during the Cold War and its relation with art and technology labs at universities and corporations as well as for government projects. Many of these labs and projects are explicitly being invoked in the present as antecedents for the current experimentation, regardless of the efficacy of the earlier incarnations. Some examples explored in the talk will likely include the Eames Office, MIT (Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Center for Art, Science and Technology), Fluxus, LACMA's 1960s Art and Technology project and its current rebook Art+Technology, Bell Labs, Abel Gance (narrative surrealism in cinema) and IBM.

Speaker information

Professor Ryan Bishop,Professor Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics, Co-Director of the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media, Director of Research and Doctoral Research within Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton.

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