[ISEA2011] Panel: Baruch Got­tlieb – The Ma­te­ri­al­ity of Dig­i­tal Utopia

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.