MOBILE AESTHETICS AND EMERGING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Concerning the creative and communicative practices of urgent contemporary movements and the necessity of creating alternatives for just and sustainable presents and future forms of life.
Possible topics include:

• Human trafficking and resistance movements - What are the limitations of those practices and what can we articulate at this forum to imagine newer directions in the movement?
• Visual pedagogies and activism
• Comparative analysis of aesthetics of social movements
• What are the new translocal relationships that are currently emerging between visual/symbolic languages of cultural resistance?
• Whither the Cosmopolitan Other? The changing definitions of alterity in the contemporary geo-political world-system
• The question of the archive: What to carry forward into the next world?
• Gender and decolonial thinking

TRANSLOCALITIES/TRANSMODERNITIES

Our interest is in pluralizing the understanding of visual practices in transnational cultural formations in order to facilitate new, intersectional and relational connections between communities, histories and discourses.
Possible topics include:

• What are the emerging opportunities for reconfiguring translocal sodalities?
• What are the terms of the context that the globalized art world creates for visual artists in sites of geo-political and cultural alterity?
• What marks current global trends of critiques of power across visual systems?
• What are the discursive limits of art criticism and other disciplinary knowledges for critically engaging emerging translocal practices?
• How visual artists in the Global South have used the possibilities of the art world circuits and discourses of international biennials to question normative descriptions of democracy and produce new political visions.

MEDIA INSURGENCIES

Concerning the evolving global commons of critical, innovative, and imaginative responses to political, social, cultural and environmental crises.
Possible topics include:

• What are the alternative circuits of exchange that occur between sites in the Global South? What characterizes these circuits and determines their viability? How can they be supported or sustained?
• Fourth Cinema: new cinematic/media aesthetics from indigenous peoples and peoples of the Global South
• How do liberatory imaginings of "cyberspace" get negotiated or reworked in the generative contexts of open source and information access of community-based media
• Reconsidering the ‘Digital Divide’
• Developing comparative approaches to transnational digital culture analysis
• How can the transnational paradigm of Third Cinema be re-thought in the context of local struggles for information technology access and self-determination?

Welcome!!

The Visuality and Alterity Working Group at University of California, Berkeley is hosting a symposium entitled Out of TimeSpace: Critical Dialogues on Visuality and Alterity for the fall of 2007, November 9 – November 11. The purpose of the symposium is to deepen an interdisciplinary conversation on theories and practices of visual experience and production in the context of multiple sites of alterities and social movements. In order to create a context for an expanded and trans-disciplinary debate amongst artists, art theorists, activists, cultural studies scholar activists, women’s studies scholar activists, art historians, ethnic studies scholar activists, and others, we will put the analysis of different scopic regimes of contemporary globalities in a comparative conversation with each other and create a discourse on visuality that recognizes and theorizes new circuits, modes and contents of exchange, critique and power. The symposium will create an opportunity for generating urgently needed and significant praxical transformations.

This is a space for dialogue before and after the symposium.