The future comes to Melbourne
Sci-fi aficionados, get ready: Melbourne will receive a visit by Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of the science fiction genre of cyberpunk, for the very first time. Bruce’s work as a future thinker and visionary who has been shaping the forefront of design and technology can be followed at his Wired column, Beyond the Beyond. His public lecture at Deakin Edge this coming August 18th will tackle the bleeding edge of contemporary culture: Alien Aesthetics. The idea of Alien Aesthetics is better known through the work of Ian Bogost. According to Bogost, Alien Aesthetics is not concerned with trying to “satisfy our human drive for art and design, but to fashion design fictions”. These kinds of alien design fictions can be seen in the images produced by Google’s Inceptionism, which capture the deep dreams of artificial neural networks. Alien Aesthetics is also present in pop culture, as in the work of artist Holly Herndon, whose new album Platform has been heralded as a fusion between critical thinking about technology and creative exploration of what she calls “alien sounds”. This kind of cross-polination between contemporary theory and creative practice will also take place at a free parallel event at LOOP Bar on August 17th: Conversations about Alien Aesthetics. This event is organised by a partnership between the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University and The New Centre of Research & Practice, a global research platform dedicated to transdisciplinary exchanges between art and science, and will feature local and virtual speakers from the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Brazil.
http://alienaesthetics.space/conversations
