Dear ADA
There is an announcement and CFP on the very near horizon for our next symposium, in Dunedin this September, and also the documentation of the Easter launch event for the Mesh Cities Christchurch project. More on those to follow…
In the meantime, the next event on the ADA Network horizon is ISEA 2013, in Sydney from 7-16 June.
Su Ballard, Vicki Smith and I are hosting a panel discussion for the ISEA conference, which is currently scheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday June 11, although the final programme has not yet been published.
The panel abstract and details are below, but we will be using it as a chance to elicit ideas, examples, feedback, and responses from conference attendees from around the world on the possibilities of 'Media Art in the Transitional City'. As with the rest of this research programme, this emerges from the Christchurch 'situation', but extends out to the rest of NZ and the world.
This is fairly explicitly responding to the conference theme 'resistance is fertile'...
Please post any feedback, examples, thoughts, etc, any of you have around these ideas. And, please, let us know if you will be in Sydney for / at the same time as ISEA and are interested in participating in some way.
Best
Zita
Media art and the transitional city
Following the earthquake of February 2011, the central city of Christchurch, New Zealand, has been largely dismantled. Huge tracts of open ground spread out where buildings once stood, and much of the centre is still closed off to residents. Navigating around hurricane fences, demolition sites, and the street-gouges of caterpillar tracks has forced a renegotiation of the format of the city and its built and deconstructed spaces. At the same time, the command and control process of 'recovery' adopted by central government, against international best practice, explicitly reduces scope for community consultation in the reconstruction of the city. In a city that is exhausted and bewildered by natural disaster and its response, resistance feels fundamentally futile. And yet, in this place, it has never been so important.
In the shadow of the demolitions, or rather the open spaces in their wake, artists are regenerating empty lots, blank walls, and social connections, in what seem like resistant creative acts. However the officially-designated rebuild-in-progress 'transitional city' relies on this creative endeavour, vesting artists and others with the responsibility of making the blank city more appealing to visitors and residents.
Aotearoa Digital Arts' 'Mesh Cities' project explores the potential role of media art in transitional and future Christchurch. At this early stage in the project, this panel asks how productive media art can actually be for reimagining, remembering, reinvigorating, reconnecting with, or indeed resisting, urban and social space.
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