Events Archive

Euphoria & Dystopia Symposium, Book Launch, Symposium and Student Workshop

The Banff New Media Institute (1995-2010) in the awe-inspiring Rocky Mountains was a dynamic international centre that addressed dramatically changing times—the heady rise of the digital age, its tumultuous descent, and its reformulation. BNMI hosted leading artists, designers, computer scientists and engineers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, humanists, social scientists, and medical researchers. Its cutting edge summits (think tanks) foretold that future. These occurred at The Banff Centre, side by side with international artists’ residencies, co-productions, transdisciplinary research, new media exhibitions and the incubation of commercial products and companies. The BNMI predicted and shaped trends in digital media.

The Euphoria & Dystopia OCAD University/NCE GRAND symposium on January 31st and February 1st in Toronto invites reflection on the digital concerns of the 1990s and early twenty-first century, weighing these preoccupations against contemporary research, industrial, social and cultural trends. It includes dialogues between current digital media researchers, thinkers and BNMI participants; a student research event and a lecture and book/archive launch by Sarah Cook and Sara Diamond, the authors of Euphoria & Dystopia: the Banff New Media Institute Dialogues.

The conference will investigate seven themes: The Material Known as Data (the imminence of data, its analysis and visualization, memory and documentation); Physics, Perception, Immersion (graphics, 3D worlds, the underlying mathematical and scientific grounding for new media); Becoming Machine, Staying Human (artificial life, artificial intelligence, robotics); The Art Formerly Known As New Media (curatorial practice, digital art’s exhibition and historicization) Social and Individual Identity (new media identities, gender, cultural difference, health and wellness); Money and Law (new media economies and social policy); Production and Distribution (models of collaboration in new media). 

Click here to read the Call for Participation 

Tentative Schedule