[artinfo] Memories of the Future Conference // June 25 2010 Gent (BE)

[Stoffel Debuysere]

Memories of The Future
Friday June 25th 2010, Arts Centre <http://www.vooruit.be/>Vooruit, Gent (BE)

The rapid rise of digital network culture has a 
fundamental influence on the construction of our 
personal and social memory. The technologies used 
today to register, organise, find and share 
information have thoroughly changed our relation 
to past and present, but also the dynamics 
between remembering and forgetting. Consequently, 
the role and function of traditional memory 
institutions such as the museum, the library and 
the archive call for a reconsideration.

Now that it has become more and more easy to 
store and share information, new media promise 
not only an expansion but even a replacement of 
human memory. At the same time, there is a 
growing awareness that the accessibility and 
readability of information is increasingly 
dependent on different fast-changing layers of 
technological and social mediation. At first 
sight, we seem to be caught between two doomed 
visions: a future in which it will become 
impossible to escape from a digital mode of 
remembering and being remembered; and a society 
which remains attached to traditional 
preservation and memory practices and therefore 
is rendered blind to an important part of our 
history. How to find a new balance?

This conference intends to examine the role and 
notion of memory within a digital culture. What 
are the new memory forms developing today, 
hovering between the physical and the virtual, 
the local and the global, the formal and the 
informal, remembering and forgetting? What do the 
new memory paradigms represent for the social 
function and responsibility of memory 
institutions? What strategies can they- in the 
light of the expansion of information and memory 
industries - put in place to continue playing a 
lasting role in the public sphere? And finally, 
what are the implications for our use of digital 
resources - from a personal, educational, 
scientific or industrial perspective - as well as 
for the way in which we confer meaning to them? 
In other words, how can the traces of the past 
find a new place in the present, as a promise to 
the future?

With Geoffrey C. Bowker, Peter B. Kaufman, Geert 
Lovink, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Andrew Payne, 
Richard Rinehart.

Free entrance. More info & registration: 
<http://events.ibbt.be/archipelmemoriesofthefuture>http://events.ibbt.be/archipelmemoriesofthefuture