CONFERENCE TO DISCUSS THE IMPACT OF THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES ON THE ART OF TODAY

On 5 and 6 October 2004, Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art,  Palma is organising a conference on the impact of the new technologies on artistic creation. Coinciding with the beginning of the university year, this series is being held within the context of the video artist Fabrizio Plessi’s exhibition "I lavatoi dell’anima", which will be on display in the Aljub Exhibition Room until 7 November 2004.

The idea for this seminar arose from Fabrizio Plessi’s attitude; he considers that video and technology are mere tools at the service of the artist and not an end in themselves. The main concern of this interesting creator, who has devoted himself to the so-called video arts for more than thirty years, is, in his own words, “to strip technology of its anti-humanistic aspect and demonic connotations and make it more human, charging it with significance and emotion”. Plessi is reacting to a fairly widespread tendency to allow the technological media to dominate us. In his works he demands the restoration of such concepts as sensitivity, beauty and the aesthetics that today are scorned or marginalised by numerous artists and critics, who consider them to be obsolete or irrelevant to the concerns of our society. Here, we propose a series of subjects that, at the dawn of the 21st century, are worthy of analysis within the context of the recent evolution of artistic creation, towards, for example, its dehumanisation or drift towards other extra-artistic territories.

In order to reflect on these questions, Es Baluard has invited five specialists from different cultural fields: the teaching of the new technologies, aesthetics, art criticism, poetry and philosophy.