VVitchVVavve: Post Digital Aesthetics Symposium
8 December 2018 Waxing Crescent, Saturday 12noon – 20.00

Siteworks, 33 Saxon Street. Brunswick VIC 3056. Australia

www.vvitchvvavve.me

Vvitchvvavve features practitioners who engage with post digital aesthetics and are concerned with processes in art-making and conceptual frameworks that assume digitality rather than treat it as an exception. Their tools are ubiquitous, situated, embedded with neoslime, embracing material speculation, curious imperfection, mawkish plasticity, rather than a transhuman sterilised alien ideal of perfection.

Artists and curators Nancy Mauro-Flude (TAS) and Tom Penney (VIC) from the Digital Media Program at RMIT lead the event to identify and explore how the global post digital discussion links to active and current practices of artists in the Southern Hemisphere. Therefore, they ask: How can Australia and its people contribute to the conversation that has shifted to the North in the past decade? What nuances can we add? How does the embodiment of digitally mediated, aesthetic and spiritual values differ? How are artists countering or propagating existing structures of power and post digital materiality? Is the Post Digital still a useful analytical category?

Often post digital culture provides aesthetic stimulation as well as facilitating consumption. VVitchVVavve features work by artists exploring a vast range of post digital digestion, production and consumption, not to mention recent developments in algorithmic culture, VR and AR. The tensions in these artists’ works suggest a vexing relationship with the digital as exacerbated by the need to explore new technologies for the purpose of critique. As such post digitality expresses strange ironies as these artists stare into and cultivate the language of the post digital abyss, and this manifests in a variety of aesthetic approaches.

Responding to these propositions through through performances, talks, a yarning circle, workshop and installations - artists, scholars, and activists - will gather at Siteworks Brunswick, to share explore instants of the post digital aesthetic including occult computing from the arcane to the present day add to this conversation.

VVitchVVavve: Post Digital Aesthetics Symposium with: Angie Abdilla (SYD/TAS), Ben Byrne (VIC), Kate Geck (VIC), Mohamed Chamas (VIC), Florian Cramer (R'DAM), Richie Cyngler (TAS), Annet Dekker (A'DAM), Denby Smith (VIC), Markéta Dolejšová (PRAGUE), Timothy Dwyer (VIC), Kimberly D'Amazing (VIC), Claire Field (Syd), Jay Rosenbaum (VIC), Adrian Lucas-Healey (VIC), Patrick McMahon (VIC), Tom Penney (VIC), Theo Trian (LA) and others.

VVitchVVavve: was supported by RMIT School of Design and Despoinas Critical Media Coven.