A two-day conference and workshop conceptualized by Shuddhabrata Sengupta along with Goethe-Institut Kolkata
The ubiquitous availability of digital technology, especially through handheld tools like smartphones and tablets, has caused a revolution in artistic creation, as well as in the dissemination of artistic creativity through a variety of digital platforms. With the enormous potential of digital creativity comes the downside of deep-fake making that can play havoc with individual reputations, chat-gpt dilutions of authorial integrity and questions of control and autonomy. Digital Platforms have become important sites of dissemination and exhibition of art works, of visual art, photography and new and experimental music.
All these lead to questions like: how does the new contemporary digital environment produce potentials and perils for artists? How does the flexibility of digital rendition affect the aesthetics and quality of artistic production? What steps can artists take to protect the integrity of their work online? How to negotiate the ethics of duplication, transformation and virality? How do curation, criticism and collecting stand transformed by the new technologies of making, display and distribution?
The two-day programme is aimed at enabling a platform for discussion and presentations of the possibilities of digital media, and new media technologies for the contemporary arts including screen based moving images, theatre, dance, music and the visual arts. Two days will be spent on discussing histories, practices, legal, ethical and philosophical questions, as well as the emerging interface between the arts, culture and the society.
The programme includes fourteen experts joining from India and Germany physically and online to conduct different sessions and present interesting case studies. Two selected artists from India will also undergo a three-day virtual reality film-making workshop with the German expert Tim Deussen prior to the conference and will be presenting their work in progress during the programme.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta is a cultural commentator, media practitioner, artist, curator and a writer interested in the areas of new media and digital art practice, media research, interpreting the city and the urban experience, open-source models for creativity, and networked histories. He is a member of the Raqs Media Collective, Delhi. Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as a group of artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes.
