New
Materialism

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Organisers

Dr Jussi Parikka

Dr Milla Tiainen

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Far from being immaterial, digital culture consists of heterogeneous bodies, relations, intensities, movements, and modes of emergence manifested in the various contexts of arts and sciences.
“New materialism” is suggested as a speculative concept with which to engage these explorations across diverse cultural-theoretical fields of inquiry: art and media studies, social and political theorizing, feminist analysis, and science and technology studies.

This event maps the ways in which questions of process, positive difference or the new, relation, and the pervasively aesthetic character of our emergences with the world have lately been taken up in cultural theory. Specifically it concerns studies with digital culture that rethink matter, the body and the social, and the move beyond the dominance of symbolic mediation or the despotism of the signifier.

In order not to reproduce the logic of identity, the event does not attribute ‘new materialist’ developments exclusively to any single or collaborative authorial name (such as Deleuze-Guattari, despite their crucial influence). New materialisms are rather addressed in a transversal mode. This entails investigating the heterogeneous theoretical inspirations – from process philosophies to re-appropriations of the sciences – they can draw on. It also entails appreciating the singular problems and connections of specific projects.

The talks of the event will address media arts of digital culture, sonic environments, cinematic contexts, wireless communication and a variety of further phenomena in order to develop a new vocabulary for understanding digital culture as a material culture.

Keynote Speakers:

Dr Adrian Mackenzie
Dr Stamatia Portanova
Dr Iris van der Tuin
Dr Rick Dolphijn
Dr Satinder Gill
Dr Anna Powell
Dr David Berry
Dr Eleni Ikoniadou
The academic programme is followed by a physical computing/dance performance involving CoDE affiliated staff (Richard Hoadley and Tom Hall) together with the choreographer Jane Turner, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and their dancers.

Further details here