Panel Statement

Panel: Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats

A uni­fy­ing thread that runs through­out Bur­rell’s the­o­ret­i­cal and prac­ti­cal re­search (which in­clude mixed re­al­ity and vir­tual art pro­jects) has been one of ex­plor­ing and search­ing for a po­ten­tial site of the self – and to dare to won­der if this site ex­ists at all. In his pre­sen­ta­tion he will focus on ob­ser­va­tions of the nat­ural his­tory of the phys­i­cal world and ask what a nat­ural his­tory of a hab­it­able vir­tual en­vi­ron­ment may be and how one may emerge as we move into this en­vi­ron­ment and make it our own, and in­deed how this may dif­fer from those of the real world. In doing so he will also ask how the post-hu­man self is start­ing to in­habit these spaces and how it will fit into these new ecolo­gies. The pre­sen­ta­tion will take the form of a po­etic jour­ney fo­cus­ing on the artist’s own phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cally per­ceived self. He will move from a poorly re­called past (as a per­sonal nar­ra­tive of his own his­tory) and into an imag­ined fu­ture – as vividly il­lus­trated and an­tic­i­pated through the artis­tic imag­i­na­tion – with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to his own cre­ative pro­jects and to the works of the Aus­tralian writer Greg Egan.

• An­drew Bur­rell is a Syd­ney, Australia, based artist and writer. He is ex­plor­ing no­tions of self and nar­ra­tive and the im­pli­ca­tions of vir­tual worlds and ar­ti­fi­cial life sys­tems upon an in­di­vid­ual’s sense of iden­tity. A uni­fy­ing thread through­out his prac­tice of the last years, has been one of ex­plor­ing and search­ing for a po­ten­tial site of the self – and to even dare to won­der if this site ex­ists at all. In ob­serv­ing the nat­ural his­tory of the real world, and in ask­ing what a nat­ural his­tory a vir­tual en­vi­ron­ment may be, he has been ex­tend­ing this on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion. He has also been cre­at­ing fan­ci­ful struc­tures that in­ves­ti­gate new pos­si­bil­i­ties for a post-hu­man self, and nar­ra­tive con­structs in which to con­tain them. He holds a PhD from the Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney and ex­hibits, pre­sents and pub­lishes lo­cally, in­ter­na­tion­ally and on­line. miscellanea.com