Panel Statement
Panel: On the Persistence of Hardware
The Materiality of the Digital: The Problematic Persistence of Hardware in Digital Creation. The citizen creator of the current age is advertised to be empowered of unprecedented means for transforming the world. Promises to ‘Make a smarter planet’ (IBM) and make.?believe (Sony) harken back to the poetics Plato would expel from his Republic. This paper will attempt to evaluate the idealism of the digital age with reflection of the material circumstances of the hardware which is expected to generate it.
- Baruch Gottlieb is a Canadian filmmaker, artist, writer and organizer, working on themes related to the technical image. Gottlieb’s art examines the immense discrepancies of scale in the contemporary experience of the world, from the astronomical, through the ‘human scale’, to the infinitesimal, through a ‘syntax of human form’ of dance , movement and bodily expression in media. This work thus always includes a performative aspect and has also been implemented in works of stage performance, public art and net-based art. Gottlieb is founding member of the Laboratoire Deberlinisation, and co-creator of the AFRO series of utopian pan-african currency and ancillary projects. He organizes the SFX series of sound-art festivals in Seoul, the McLuminations series of philosophical screening events in Berlin and itinerant events under the epithet New Materialism.