Drawing on Bertold Brecht`s comment that art „is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it,” the keynote address thinks about the role of media in art over the past fifty years and the broader social entanglements of the digital age in the contexts of research and development of military, surveillance, and mind control technologies; biopolitics and genetic engineering; capitalism, market—driven art production, and global biennials; the impact of new media in augmenting inter— and transdisciplinary social engineering of the production of knowledge and its diminutions; embodied perception and questions of subjectivity, anonymity, agency, and collectivity; performativity, social media, activism, and spectacle; and the ethics of the scale and pace of digital advances.
Kristine Stiles is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art, professor at Duke University. She is best known for her work on artists` writings, performance art, feminism, destruction and violence in art, and trauma in art. Her publications have addressed the work of remarkable artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Chris Burden, Marina Abramović, STELARC, Jeffrey Shaw.
