Keynote Talk: From Analog to Digital, Fictive vs. Documentary: An Ongoing Journey

This talk will focus upon a personal update of my sojourn as an artist/academician - a journey that has led me from the analog to the electronic medium spanning a timeline of 30 odd years. The exploration, still in progress, will start with city planning, architecture and photography where I acquired, and developed my analog skills. Following this, I will focus on my encounter with the digital revolution, right at a time when the foundations were being laid at one of the leading institutions of the world. I will then ponder on the possible common grounds between analog/digital also by bringing in notions such as serendipity, surprise, uncertainty, inadvertence that lie at the heart of my creative practice. These will constitute the grounds upon which I base my computational art experimentations and my academic research on various transformations in contemporary aesthetics that I believe arose out of digital creativity. Since my main visualization area is photography; indispensable conceptual components such as representation, real, surreal, objectivity, subjectivity, construct will be mentioned and linked to an empirical process based practice.

In addition to investigations on possible relations between art and engineering, I will also reveal my cultural, social, political stance in the light of issues like local vs. global and rhizomatic vs. hierarchic. I will then conclude with my recent concentration on documentary work, after numerous fictive constructions in the digital realm. My objective is to emphasize participatory, collective culture and history making by taking advantage of the democratization brought by ubiquitous mobile imaging and social media communication.