The "ARTS IN CONTEXT. In Between Practices" conference takes place from June 6 until June 8, 2016 in Kristiansand, Norway, organized by Agader University. The conference will reflect on current trends in contemporary art. Arts in Context is an interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic research and development platform for scholarly and artistic research within – and across – the disciplines of music, theatre and the visual arts. More on the website of Agder University: http://kik.uia.no/.

The conference program: http://kik.uia.no/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/KiK-program-28-05.pdf

RIXC artist and curator Rasa Smite will be giving a key-note lecture.

Rasa Smite
"Creative Networks. From Internet Radio Experiments to Techno-Ecological Art Practices”

June 6, 2016
Agder University, Kristiansand, Norway

Today, according to several voices – Rosalind Krauss, Lev Manovich, Peter Weibel and Domenico Quaranta – we have entered the post-media age; there is no any single medium anymore that dominates in contemporary media art practices. Artists, who in the information technology era at the close of the 20th century were at an emerging art avant-garde – experimenting with immaterial medium of information technology and exploring the boundaries of the new cyberspace – are now returning to social reality. This is not new, that media art critically addresses socially political questions, however the perspective revealed by this setting is. More recently an interest in green lifestyles, alternative energy resources and other sustainable issues has grown, hence demanding radically new perspective to be built, which we call “techo-ecological”. RIXC’s initiated Renewable Network artists have teamed up with scientists, rural inhabitants and urban communities to develop new ideas for more sustainable and more imaginative future – making edible solar batteries, installing bio-energy plants in a pond, sonifying and visualizing environmental data, developing interfaces for human-plant communication, growing urban bees and mapping their routes across the city, proposing cloud-farming as a new agricultural field for collecting clean water, creating celulouse enzymes for providing food solutions in an overpopulated future world... Hence, contemporary media art mixes not only media, but also seeks out new contact zones between different fields. I also would like to argue, that the artists who are capable to transform their earlier networking experience and to use collaborative potential also in post-media age (e.g. working together with scientists, engaging with local communities) are continuing to innovate and changing the role of art in society.

http://smitesmits.com