Symposium "Authorship, Subjectivity, and Digital Immortality in the Era of Alienated Memory"
The symposium explores the relationship between contemporary individuals and memory in the digital age. People today create vast amounts of memories — they take photos, record audio, film videos of themselves and their surroundings, write messages daily, and keep journals. Their lives are documented more thoroughly than any others before the digital era. Our memories collect dust in the limbo of servers and never truly disappear. However, access to this memory is always mediated by social media feeds or suggested search results — individuals no longer have a direct channel to their own memories, as they are now appropriated by tech platforms.
9–10 November 2024
Kanepes Kultūras Centrs
Skolas iela 15, Riga, Latvia
Working language: English
We propose to discuss:
1. What changes are occurring in practices of gathering. collecting, and archiving in the digital reality?
2. How can digital memory become re-appropriated?
3. What relationships emerge between re-appropriation and subjectivity?
4. What tools might we envision for this re-appropriation?
5. What does the authorial position mean in a world where nothing truly disappears?
Participants:
Mikhail Bogomolny: architect, learning environment developer; Archmeta, CEO Aigars Ceplītis: RISEBA University, Executive Dean of Faculty of Media and Creative Technologies, assistant professor
Dāvis Kaņepe: director; Kanepes Kultūras Centrs, founder
Nikolai Margiev: researcher, curator
Jānis Putniņš: director; National Film School of the Latvian Academy of Culture, director
Andis Sīlis: architect; SIA SZK un Partneri, Chairman of the Board
Alexander Sheyn: director, producer; RISEBA University, Faculty of Media and
Creative Technologies, PhD student
Artūrs Virtmanis: artist; Riga Art Space, artistic director, curator
Symposium Program:
9 November, Kanepes Kultūras Centrs, Skolas iela 15
19:00 — Introductory speech by Symposium’s organisers
19:15 — Premier screening of The All of Everything (2024) by Alexander Shein
21:00 — Q&A with the authors
The All of Everything (2024) by Alexander Sheyn
The All of Everything is an essay-film, a research of the relations between cinema
and memory. It consists of fragments of footage, archival material, found footage
and accidental media fragments. The film is an attempt to link together a
kaleidoscope of images, dispersed in space and time, in order to manifest a
private fate of an unnamed hero, who is, after all, an each and every one of us.
10 November, Kanepes Kultūras Centrs, Skolas iela 15
12:00 — Gathering of the participants.
12:30 — Symposium opening. Alexander Sheyn. Introduction of the problematics.
13:00 — Mikhail Bogomolny. Architecture between the word and the thing.
13:30 — Jānis Putniņš. Authorial position in found footage: ways of reappropriation.
14:30 — Artūrs Virtmanis. Entropic museum — digging for a meaning in virtual ruins.
15:00 — Break.
16:00 — Aigars Ceplītis. Exploring memory re-appropriation through virtual reality: AI solutions for cognitive mitigation.
16:25 — Dāvis Kaņepe. Legacy of an artist. Cinematographic and photographic heritage of Siegfried.
17:30 — Andis Sīlis. Non finito architecture. Rewriting and reusing structures as endless process in memory and architecture.
18:00 — Symposium conclusion. Final remarks.
For registration to the events of the symposium please send an email to:
atlas.vsego@gmail.com.