Talks & Workshops

Guided tours, performative walks, virtual expeditions and more.

From Electronic Superhighway to the Digital Dark Age 

St. Edmund’s Church

Fri, 12 to 1.30pm

In 2015, Google’s Vint Cerf spoke publicly about his fear of a digital ‘dark age’ calling for a 21st century digital vellum to protect against losing the knowledge we have learnt today in the future. It is hard to imagine if and what digital culture might be lost to the annals of time, what to hold on to and safeguard, or even where digital objects begin and end. From narratives of colonial extraction and extinction to processes of planetary computation and observation, a line-up of Digital Dark Ages artists, as well as media curators and theorists, talk about the expanded and entangled situated complexity for digital preservation today.

Supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Creative Europe programme of the European Union. 

 

Rendering the Past Talk

Village Hall

Fri, 4 to 5pm

New rendering and image making techniques like photogrammetry and LIDAR scanning are allowing us to visualize previously hidden or forgotten histories. Archaeologist Dr Alice Watterson and artist Dr Kieran Baxter, both experts in digital surveying and visualisation, talk through recent projects and the opportunities and challenges digital reconstruction presents for new forms of storytelling, archaeological research and animating the past.

This panel is a collaboration with NEoN Digital Arts Festival, supported by Creative Scotland.

 

Rare Minerals + Q&A

Village Hall

Fri, 5.30 to 7pm

Rare Minerals uncovers varying forms of temporality brought about through an exploration of memory, data, space and geology. After the screening of White Mountain, Director Emma Charles will talk about her forthcoming project with artist and gallerist Ben James, When Objects Dream, which continues Charles’ investigation into making tangible our relationship with technology. The film follows the journey of technology from the mineral-rich earth to the city. The backdrop is the vast Kazakh landscape, and the traditional folklore stories of its inhabitants, as a framework within which to explore some of the material and immaterial interfaces that exist between technology and human experience.