Journeys and Transmission

The Land/Water 2016 symposium, Journeys and Transmission, explores contemporary concerns about our relationship to the world, following the journeys we make as artists and researchers to acquire knowledge and to share an understanding of what it is to be human in the post-industrial era of an increasingly globalized and networked twenty first century. These journeys may be personal - understood as a changing consciousness or a sense of identity and selfhood, or an altered subjective space; conceptual - manifested as a paradigm shift within a philosophical framework or ‘thinking outside the box’; or geographic - driven by social, economic or political imperatives. Using an engaged, critical lens, we consider the ways in which creative practitioners respond to the land and the waters that flow through it, translating sensory or digital data into material forms. In addition, we are interested in the manner in which information is conveyed/transmitted across time and place - from one generation of people to another, questioning the appropriation of the past as evidence for the writing of history in relation to its use as the source of stories in the present. Also of relevance are the ways in which ideas are conveyed between practices, or are reshaped in the transmission from one medium to another, or through combination, creating new hybrid forms that extend aesthetic appreciation and cultural critique into new areas.