Rethinking Digital Futures: NEoN Mini Symposium

Abstract

The NEoN Festival mini-symposium this year is focused on the intersection of tradition and craft with the digital transformation of art and design. Artists participating in the festival will reflect on their own processes, demonstrating influences of ways of working from the disparate and shared heritage practices of the North East of North Asia including Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, China and South Korea. While the West often looks to the East for visions of the future in the form of science fiction or new intelligent robotic gadgets it is also in the east where tradition is more keenly understood and practiced, with NEoN festival featuring works in hand drawn animation, shadow puppetry, and poetry. How do artists and designers sustain their inherited traditional practices in a time of digital transformation - with audiences ever-shortening attention spans, networked memory, and a reliance on mediated digital assets to tell the story for us? Our global interconnectedness means we are influenced as much by what is going on on the other side of the globe as by what is happening in their own neighbourhood. This symposium will address how cultural influence affects making, how artistic traditions mutate, while shining a critical light on the practices of artists and designers working within a digitally transformed worldview. Supported by the AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Leader Fellowshi