Coming up next: The 4th international conference Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science in Vienna goes online

The upcoming conference Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science will take place November 26–28, 2020, will be exclusively online as TTT2020 Vienna/Online, an umbilical cord between what would be and what it is. The new digital venue will host and present a repertoire of theoretical and art practice presentations. Whilst broadening the scope of access for our attendees and participants across borders and disciplines, TTT2020 continues to focus (a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and aesthetics of liminality as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, and (b) on the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging engagement of science and art.

What constitutes the unstable limits of what can be morally and epistemically accepted should be read within the historical horizons of cultures and circumstances. After all, what seems outrageously transgressive at one moment in time and from one perspective may eventually transcend into a commonplace practice. As we experience and even endorse a gradual, but substantial, de-centering away from anthropocentric values and ontologies, potentially critique harbours turmoil. Art practices pose critical questions about our certainties; sciences and humanities constantly test our limits and our ideas of worlds by pushing forward the conditions in which knowledge is produced.

Developments in science and technology, that seem to enhance the borders of our experience of worlds and selves, revealing sometimes the fragility of social values, should be interrogated. Identities, ideologies, multiplicities, worlds, and visions are accepted and rejected, invented and destroyed; what are the forces behind and beyond? We propose critique within a transdiscipline, where science, arts, and humanities meet in a research quest, in an attempt at reframing and reconfiguring what there is.

A brainchild of Dalila Honorato, Assistant Professor at the Ionian University, the first two conferences, TTT2016 and TTT2017 were held in Corfu, organized by the Department of Audio & Visual Arts and supported by public and private institutions, mostly local. In the first two years the conference counted, with the presence of Stelarc, Roy Ascott, Adam Zaretsky, Manos Danezis, Polona Tratnik, Gunalan Nadarajan, Irina Aristarkhova, Marta de Menezes, Maria Antonia Gonzalez Valerio, Andrew Carnie and Kathy High as guest speakers. The third TTT conference, TTT2018, took place in Mexico City, hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Centro de Cultura Digital. Following an invitation of Marta De Menezes, Ana Ventura Miranda and Maria Antonia González Valerio, the conference was co-organized by the Research and Creation Group Arte+Ciencia, UNAM (MX), Arte Institute (USA), Cultivamos Cultura (PT) besides the Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University (GR).

Since the beginning TTT intends to provide a comfortable set for the interaction of its participants and the students of the academic institution hosting it. This is accomplished through the coordination of the conference’s agenda with the development of other activities such as art exhibitions, screenings, live performances, book presentations, poster exhibitions and workshops developed within the hosting institution in collaboration with other organizations.

More info: https://avarts.ionio.gr/ttt/