It gives us great pleasure to announce our next lecture in the Moorpark College Year of Science and Religion. Roy Ascott is a pioneer of multimedia, and will be taking us far outside of our usual box as he speaks about:

 “THE TECHNOETIC CULTURE: syncretising art, technology and the spiritual in the 21st century”
Time: Wednesday, May 2nd at 7:00 PM
Place: Moorpark College Performing Arts Center

Since the 1960s, the British educator, artist and theoretician Roy Ascott has been one of Europe's most active and outspoken practitioners of interactive computer art. Pioneering the place of cybernetics and telematics in art, Roy Ascott has been working with issues of art, technology and consciousness. He is President of the Planetary Collegium.
For more information about Roy's work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Ascott
http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Ascott.html
http://people.i-dat.org/detail/?ra

ABSTRACT:

THE TECHNOETIC CULTURE: syncretising art, technology and the spiritual in the 21st century.

Roy Ascott

Syncretism, which has been seen historically as an attempt to reconcile and analogise disparate religious and cultural practices, may contribute today to our understanding of the multi-layered worldviews - materialist and metaphysical - that are emerging with our engagement in, amongst other innovations, ubiquitous computing and post-biological technology. In some religious or spiritual contexts, syncretism has meant combining, from a diversity of sources, rituals, psychic instruments, and psychoactive entheogens, into new forms of sacred communion. A parallel process can be  seen in Western technological culture, with its rituals of communication, digital instrumentation, and technoetic media. Syncretic thinking is associative and non-linear. Emergent bodies of knowledge on the edges of science, as with gnostic systems of older cultures, embrace what established societies and their enforced orthodoxies treat as alien, or proscribed.
The emphasis in this presentation will be the relationship between the  moistmedia of digital and biological technology, new scientific models of reality, and art, and the technoetic, spiritual context within which this relationship can be viewed. In short, it’s about the syncretic reality that is being construed and constructed by the convergence of art and science . Above all it is about breaking ontological boundaries while maintaining cohesion and coherence.

For more information, please contact: Janice Daurio, Ph.D. (philosophy), John Baker, D.Phil. (anthropology), or Svetlana Kasalovic, M.A. (multimedia design)
skasalovic@vcccd.edu

Moorpark College
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