Critical Strategies in Art and Media - announcement

Critical Strategies in Art and Media - Perspectives on New Cultural Practices

* Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish objects, what collective and collaborative practices are iinventing new terrains and flows?

* As information and communication technologies saturate our world, how is art giving way to new forms of cultural symbolic manipulation?

* Can we identify new models to replace the auteur and the artwork? If so, where do they come from and what might that say about the future of critical practices?

* What new kinds of “virtual” spaces are opening up for cultural practice in electronic media? As “old media” begin to collapse under the pressures of the virtual, what new media can we find?

* How are didactic illustration and channeled dissidence giving way to new forms of surprise and intensity?

* What strategies elude the creative industries’ seemingly infinite appetite for things radical? Are there any strategies that can elude being reduced to styles in the service of sales, or are critical practices doomed to play cat and mouse with the forces of consumerism?