Artist as Engineer
as part of 'Interrupt: Artists in Socially Engaged Practice' series of symposia organised by
Arts Council England
2-3 June 2003, University of Plymouth, UK
'Artist as Engineer' seeks to investigate a recent radical shift in the artist's social role influenced by the advent of new technologies and new collective practices. Walter Benjamin (in 'The Author as Producer' of 1934) describes the shift in the role of the cultural producer 'from a supplier of the productive apparatus, into an engineer who sees his [/her] task in adapting that apparatus thus reconciling the means of intellectual production with technical quality'. The symposium asks what conclusions might be drawn from a parallel between the contemporary practice of 'techno-art collectives' and Benjamin's statement that it is simply not enough to have political commitment without at the same time thinking through its relationship to the means of production and the technical apparatus?
Contributors
Etoy
CUKT, Central Bureau for Technological Culture/Piotr Wyrzykowski
Mongrel/Harwood
Natalie Jeremijenko &
Bureau of Inverse Technology
Redundant Technology Initiative
The Institute of Applied Autonomy
The symposium organised and introduced by
Geoff Cox &
Joasia Krysa, chaired by
Armin Medosch.
→
Symposium Abstracts
→
Introduction
Following the conference, a book
Engineering Culture has been published (Autonomedia, New York, 2005).
