Official Website of the Conference Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science
https://ttt-conference.org
The fifth international conference Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science will take place September 27–29, 2023 in Valletta, Malta. Including theoretical and art practice presentations, TTT2023 continues to focus:
(a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and aesthetics of liminality as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, and
(b) on providing uncensored space for creative transformation in the merging of science and art. Following TTT2020 Vienna/Online, the steering committee of the conference is excited about the possibility of a community reunion in the beautiful physical space of our hosting partner the Malta Society of Arts.
Since the beginning of time, taboo has traced the edges of experience. As with Icarus, whose excitement turned a blind eye to risk, leading to a deadly fall, humans have always had an unorthodox relationship with rules defining the borders of knowledge and experimentation. What constitutes the limits of the accepted, however, has to be read within the ethical horizons of a specific time frame. It is not uncommon that what seems outrageously transgressive in one moment, can eventually transcend to a commonplace practice. Limits are continuously put to test as contemporary scientific experimentation pushes forward our idea of the world, in quest for answers but also for solutions allowing us to overcome the problems present in our lives. Progress in fields such as the human genome editing, the creation of cyborgs and any human-like artificial intelligence, are only few examples presently generating double-edged questions on the nature of humanity. One could easily recall Dr. Frankenstein, whose ambition to solve the mystery of life and death ends up revealing the threshold of control between creator and creation.
As we experience scientific experimentation and artistic playfulness in the wake of a pandemic backlash, the issues in art and science keep looping between self-containment, isolation, fear of crowds and mortal reassessment. In the face of genetically engineered excesses leading to a phase of resignation, inequality and stay-in-place internment - of becoming the disease - a reassessing of identity as both parasite and host. Finding new relations to contagion and dementia bears potential turmoil; its advances are essentially stretching the borders of our experience of the world and ourselves, mostly revealing the fragility of social values. Deeply involved into this lively discourse on the nature of the taboo, art becomes the very domain of contemporary experimentation with transgression, in order to provoke and sparkle discourse, catalyzing possible forms of transcendence. Can this relation bear a force of liberation? Is there such a thing as incentive prohibitions and who/what defines the borders of accepted identities and ideologies? Immersing into the impure realm of limits and liminalities, one might trace the mental structures filtering our experience of the world, ultimately opening space for creative transformations through the mixing of art and science.
Submissions are welcome from all art and research fields and cutting-edge technology in arts-based research. Suggested, but not exclusive topics, are those associated with: Biopunk, hybridity, and aesthetics of mutation; Cyborg, augmentation, and bοdy modification; Chemistry of the mind, natural healers, and mind enhancement; Biotechnology, DIY & DIWO, and biohacking; Ethology, human and nonhuman; Evolution, genetics, and plasticity; Post-gender, transgressive identities, and social models; Human sexual response, laws of attraction, and queer- eroticism; Parasitology, symbiosis, and microbiome; Biopolitics, displacement, and resistance; Pandemic, bioterror, and scientific trust; Witchcraft, gender narrative, and history of science; Rewilding, degradation, and restoration.
The conference language is English. Proposals must be sent electronically through the EasyChair submissions system until January 31st, 2023. For more information, please check the TTT2023 official website: TTT2023 | Submissions. Following the conference, the proceedings of TTT2023 Malta will be published in two parts: a selected number of papers will be published as a special issue in the Technoetic Arts journal, published by Intellect, and the main core of the proceedings will be published by Ionian University as a formal digital publication (e-Book, ISBN included).
Co-funded for the first time by the Ionian University and the European Union, TTT2023 Malta is being organized within the framework of the project Rewilding Cultures (2022 – 2025) by the Feral Labs Network under Creative Europe. Thanks to this project, TTT is extending its activities beyond the conference, to include a series of workshops and residencies that will be announced in the fall of 2022. The project is coordinated by Projekt Atol (SI) with partners Makery (FR), Catch (DK), Schmiede (AT), Bioart Society (FI), Cultivamos Cultura (PT), Ionian University (GR) and Radiona (HR).
Official website: TTT-Conference | More information: av-ttt@ionio.gr
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About TTT
TTT is an interdisciplinary and nomadic event, where both practitioners as well as theorists present and discuss the status of art-science and/or art & technology. TTT, created by Dalila Honorato, Assoc. Professor, Dept Audio & Visual Arts of the Ionian University, is based on the support of a large informal network of international researchers and practitioners that develop their activities at the edge of art and science intersections. The TTT conference series is supported by its Steering Committee whose members include: Roy Ascott (UK), Andreas Floros (GR), Dalila Honorato (GR/PT), Gunalan Nadarajan (US), Melentie Pandilovski (AU/MK), Stelarc (AU), Polona Tratnik (SI) and Adam Zaretsky (US/GR). TTT has been hosted at the Ionian University (2016-2017), Mexico (2018), Austria-Online (2020) and will soon be hosted in Malta (2023).
