Panel Statement

Panel: Revolution of the Public Sphere

Publics, audiences, communication: how, if at all, have the new technologies infiltrated the relatíonships between people? The panel commences with a session on the oldest interactive art, the theatre, where digital technologies have raised the ante in a wild gamble with the randomness of performance. The panel moves on to explore issues of networking. Now that the information paradigm is in crisis, and the outlines of cultural exclusion have been drawn across populations accessing or refused access to the net, how are we to reconceptualise the human dimension? Perhaps the revolution is over, and we lost: the same genders, the same ‘races’, holding on to the anchors of power as the tides of change embrace everything but white masculinity. Is it possible that in place of revolutionary community, all we have achieved is public relations?

To understand these issues, we turn to history, as it is lived, as it ‘weighs on the minds of the living like a nightmare‘ in Marx’s words. Is hrstorical process over, leaving us with conservation of artefacts and attitudes? 0r has some awesome new process begun, sweeping away the discretion that has governed self and other, subject and object, dominant and resistant, to produce the grounds for a (r)evolutionary front in the digital ecology?

• Dr. Emma Roberts (UK), Convenor, Lecturer in Contextual Studies, Liverpool Art School, Liverpool John Moores University