UNNATURAL
ACTS

Techno-Performatives:
Simulations,
Appropriations,
Identities

April 23-24, 1999

1150 University Ave.
Highlander Hall 200A
Ph: (909) 787-3987
Fx: (909) 787-6377
Email: ideassoc@citrus.ucr.edu

Photo Design: Paul Simon

Sometimes referred to as 'the Disney effect' (Sherry Turkle), simulated (i.e., mediated) experience is increasingly becoming our primary means for knowing about the world. With increasingly sophisticated media technologies, we are exchanging representationsof reality for the real. What are the Implications for performance? Is simulated experience less 'real" than unmediated experience? Or does simulation offer new and equally real experiences otherwise unavailable to most of us?

Here, the emphasis is on fraud, piracy, parody, plagiarism, sampling, and other forms of expropriating and/or re/presenting expressive culture. The advent of new technologies allows us to plunder the world around us for creative material and ideas. The focus of this theme is to examine cultural appropriation as a means for political resistance/oppression, social control/liberation, and artistic creativity/exploitation.

Photo Design: Paul Simon

 

 

Identities

This theme is concerned with the creation and performance of selfhood and community through new technologies. Do these technologies (especially computers and the Internet) create space for new forms of identities and/or communities? Do they provide the Habermasion utopia of a true public sphere, with equal access to all citizens, and a place for reasoned and informed discussion? How are matters of race, class, and sexuality/gender reconfigured into such a techno-utopian (or dystopian) public space? Do new technologies break down the boundaries between self and other? Or do they create new boundaries?