[ISEA2013] Panel: Ricardo Dal Farra – Can the Arts Help to Save the World?

Panel statement

Panel: Future Nature, Future Culture[s]: Reflections on Balance-Unbalance

We are living in a world reaching a critical point where the equilibrium between a healthy environment, the energy society needs and the interconnected economies could pass more quickly than expected from the current complex balance to a complete new reality where unbalance would be the rule and human beings would need to be as creative as never before to survive. Have the arts a role in all this? Have artists a responsibility in this context? Environmental problems, economic uncertainty and political complexity has been around for a very long time. Not one year, one decade or one century. What was different before was the speed and depth of transformations compared with today’s fast changes. The frequent occurrence that certain events are having around us – such as floods, twisters, etc – seems to be increasing very fast, and the effects of human beings on modifying our adjacent surroundings as well as very distance places have turn into a power capable of changing the whole planet, improving or ruining people’s life and even eliminating all human life on Earth. In this context of global threats: how can the arts help? This apparently simple idea was the seed triggering the Balance-Unbalance project. balance-unbalance2013.org

  • Ricardo Dal Farra is professor at the Music Department of Concordia University in Montreal, and director of the Electronic Arts Research Centre (CEIArtE) at the National University of Tres de Febrero in Buenos Aires. He has been director of Hexagram, Research-Creation Centre for Media Arts and Technology in Canada; national director of the Multimedia Communication program at the Ministry of Education in Argentina; coordinator of the Documentation and Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage (DOCAM) international research alliance; and UNESCO’s consultant and researcher for the Digi-Arts project. His music and new media works have been presented in over 40 countries, and there are 20 international editions with recordings of his music. His work has been distinguished by the International Computer Music Association and the International Arts Biennial of San Pablo in Brazil, among others. Dal Farra is an active member of the Editorial Board of Leonardo (MIT Press) and Organised Sound (Cambridge University Press). Dal Farra created the Latin American Electroacoustic Music Archive at the Daniel Langlois Foundation of Montreal, and the Balance-Unbalance project that had recently its third conference at the UNESCO’s designated biosphere in Noosa, Australia.