DIGITAL MEMORIES: ART, ARCHIVES AND ACTIVISM

17 and 18 June 2019

London Campus, University of Liverpool

Organisers: Culture, Space, and Memory Research Group (Communication & Media, University of Liverpool) and ERC-funded project “We are all Ayotzinapa: The role of Digital Media in the Shaping of Transnational Memories on Disappearance” (KU Leuven)

The workshop aims to explore the reconfiguration of cultural memory under the impact of the digital turn. We are interested in grasping memory’s entanglement with artistic, activist and archival forces in a digital ecology. Questions that we would like to address in the workshop include:

· How do digital technologies contribute to, or trigger, new forms of political and artistic activism?

· How can we conceptualise the distinction between ‘collective’ and ‘connective’ memory?

· How issue-based politics and the personalization of engagement that are characteristic of digital activism affect the shaping of collective memory?

· What are the new digital (transnational, interactive, connected) communities of memory? What is the role of affect in constituting networked communities?

· How is the notion of the ‘archive’ reconfigured under the impact of digital media? What kinds of ‘rogue archives’ are produced and socialised by artists and activists after the connective turn?

· What are the political and aesthetic challenges of outsourcing memory to digital infrastructures?

· Do different platforms provide distinct affordances for the construction of memory, or should we rather focus on genres of content and memory objects that migrate across platforms, making the distinction useless?

· What concepts, ideas, debates contribute to make sense of memory practices that are distributed between non-human/post-human and human agents?

Programme available here:

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/schoolofthearts/documents/Preliminary,Programme,DIGITAL,MEMORIES.pdf

We would like to discuss these and other related questions from both theoretical and methodological perspectives, concentrating on the challenges posed by digital media to memory studies.

Guest speakers include: Dr. Joanne Garde-Hansen (Warwick), Dr. Red Chidgey (King’s College), Prof. Ana Longoni (Museo Reina Sofía/CONICET), Prof. Claire Taylor (Liverprool), Prof. Mette Mortensen (Copenhagen), Dr. Martin Pogačar (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Art), Prof. Andrew Hoskins (Glasgow), Prof. Wulf Kansteiner (Aaharus), Prof. Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt University), Prof. Annette Kuhn (Queen Mary), Dr. Zoe Alker (Liverpool), Stefan Laxness (Forensic Architecture, London).

Please send enquiries about the workshop to Dr. Jordana Blejmar (jblejmar@liverpool.ac.uk) or Dr. Silvana Mandolessi (silvana.mandolessi@kuleuven.be)