Global Imaginations: How to Visualize an Interconnected World

Symposium | 25 Sep 2015 | RCMC

The symposium aims to contribute to ongoing attempts to better understand our globally interconnected world, focusing on the ways in which artists and scholars have grappled with questions of ‘the global’ over the years.

Connecting scholars from a variety of different disciplines within the humanities and social sciences to artists, the symposium will not only examine existing academic perspectives on globalization, but also explore the possibilities to find other, innovative strategies for understanding the flows and frictions of global connections, those networks of relations between us and others in a shared world.

Ongoing rapid changes in new media technology, in the flows and vulnerabilities of global capital, and in the significant rise in voluntary and involuntary migration, among numerous other factors, demand that we seek out other more novel approaches to understanding global relations.

The symposium foregrounds the potential of art to help us comprehend the complex and often messy entanglements of the world in which we live. We contend that contemporary art can help us find alternative, diverse mappings of the world, revealing unexpected, unusual and contradictory imaginings of these global entanglements.

The symposium will revolve around questions such as:

What role do artists play in making the flows and frictions of global interconnections visible?
How do artists intervene in existing worldviews and how do these interventions help us to understand the complex fabric of today’s world?
What forms of earlier ‘global’ imaginings still haunt our global contemporary?
How might a greater attentiveness to objects help us to critically explore earlier forms of global connections?
What role do new media technologies play in how we experience and understand our world as a shared one?

Watch more lectures of the Global Imaginations symposium on our YouTube channel.

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