AN ARCHEOLOGY AND FUTURE OF MOVING PICTURES
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This media symposium brings together artists, scientists,
and critics to discuss theory and practice, and to reflect on the past,
present and future of new media, and on their social, political and
cultural context.
As contemporary societies' dependency on new communication technologies
is growing, we need to understand what the roots and ramifications of
their use are. The appearance and transformation of various forms of
image-making associated with the recent development of digital technology
have had a major impact on our perception and our concept of reality.
But, for all their novelty, these changes were unthinkable without cinema
and other early technologies and methods, as well as without scientific
discoveries that made them possible, starting with the exploration of
the persistent image by scientists in the early 19th century.
In his dissertation published in Prague in 1818, Johann Evangelista
Purkinje (Jan Evangelista Purkyně) observed that we still
see a latent image of an object a fraction-of-a-second after it disappears
from our visual field. The study of this perception-phenomenon, which
was described in a greater detail by Peter Mark Roget in 1824, laid
the foundation for technical devices and new media which turned still
images into moving pictures, including cinema, television, as well as
digital audiovisual technologies.
Purkinje’s work, which represents a fundamental connection between the
dawn of neuroscience and the rise of the technologies of the moving
image, can serve as a point of departure for reflections on the present
development of electronic media and their influence on our everyday
life. As these technologies provide us with new possibilities and change
our way of life, they necessitate explorations of their historical and
theoretical concepts, raising questions such as:
- How have our perceptions of reality changed in respect to a more and more sophisticated technical apparatus, constructed to record, scan, and generate images, and even to artificially simulate audio-visual environments and situations?
- How do new cognitive models contribute to the evolution of electronic media and, conversely, what is the role of digital technology in cognitive science?
- How do cultural traditions condition the use and development of new media on one hand, and how do new media reconfigure these traditions and our notion of history on the other?
- How do different timeframes of discourse (social, political and
- What models of collaboration between scientists and artists have been and still are constructive?
- And what are the platforms, goals and framing issues of such inter-mediations?
The project
Excavating the Future
is part of the activities of the Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, resulting from the Center’s long-term interest in broader applications of art and technology in everyday life. Excavating the Future originates in the framework created by several projects that FCCA organized or participated in in recent years, including the New Media Exhibition Orbis Fictus (1995), active participation in the series of Flusser Media Symposia in Prague, and other programs related to the Media Laboratory founded by the FCCA three years ago. Organizers hope to help foster new international connections between individuals from different backgrounds, resulting in durable and fruitful collaborations in the future. The conference will be documented in a small brochure and, more extensively, on a website.
The project Excavating the Future continues in the tradition of the Flusser Media symposium series organized by the Goethe Institute Prag between 1992 and 1998.