Technology Now: Post-Digital Institutions and Practices

Jussi Parikka (Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics, Winchester School of Art) chairs a panel examining post-digital practices, concepts and institutions. Speakers include Kristoffer Gansing (Artistic Director, transmediale), Ryan Bishop (Professor of Global Arts and Politics, WSA), Olga Goriunova (Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture, Royal Holloway), artist Geraldine Juarez and Alessandro Ludovico (Associate Professor in Art, Design and Media, WSA).

The post-digital as an idea and a term has become a way to critically take account of, contextualise, and shift the coordinates of the debate concerning life after and in the digital, working across old and new, digital and analogue. However, the post-digital condition is not merely a theoretical issue but also a situation that affects conceptual and practice-based work. This discussion gathers scholars, curators and artists to speculate on what the post-digital institution is and what particular forms of practices are formed within and outside it. Presentations touch upon how post-digital sites in between cultural and technological fields shape imaginaries and ecologies across different scales of human and nonhuman action, mediation and infrastructure.

The theme of this discussion emerges from the book Across and Beyond: Post-Digital: Practices, Concepts and Institutions, a thematic reader of the  transmediale, an art and digital culture festival in Berlin that celebrates its 30 year anniversary edition in 2017 under the title ever elusive. The transmediale reader is published by Sternberg Press and edited by Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka and Elvia Wilk as a collaboration between the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and transmediale.