[spectre] Memories of the Future Conference // June 25 2010 Gent (BE)

[Stoffel Debuysere]

Memories of The Future
Friday June 25th 2010, Arts Centre Vooruit, Gent (BE)

The rapid rise of digital network culture has a fundamental influence  
on the construction of our personal and social memory. The  
technologies used today to register, organise, find and share  
information have thoroughly changed our relation to past and present,  
but also the dynamics between remembering and forgetting.  
Consequently, the role and function of traditional memory institutions  
such as the museum, the library and the archive call for a  
reconsideration.

Now that it has become more and more easy to store and share  
information, new media promise not only an expansion but even a  
replacement of human memory. At the same time, there is a growing  
awareness that the accessibility and readability of information is  
increasingly dependent on different fast-changing layers of  
technological and social mediation. At first sight, we seem to be  
caught between two doomed visions: a future in which it will become  
impossible to escape from a digital mode of remembering and being  
remembered; and a society which remains attached to traditional  
preservation and memory practices and therefore is rendered blind to  
an important part of our history. How to find a new balance?

This conference intends to examine the role and notion of memory  
within a digital culture. What are the new memory forms developing  
today, hovering between the physical and the virtual, the local and  
the global, the formal and the informal, remembering and forgetting?  
What do the new memory paradigms represent for the social function and  
responsibility of memory institutions? What strategies can they– in  
the light of the expansion of information and memory industries – put  
in place to continue playing a lasting role in the public sphere? And  
finally, what are the implications for our use of digital resources –  
from a personal, educational, scientific or industrial perspective –  
as well as for the way in which we confer meaning to them? In other  
words, how can the traces of the past find a new place in the present,  
as a promise to the future?

Memories of the Future is organised in the framework of the IBBT  
research project Archipel by IBBT/SMIT, FARO, BAM,  
Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent in co-operation with vzw Waalse Krook.  
In Archipel universities, heritage institutions, arts organisations  
and technology companies study the potential of a sustainable digital  
archive infrastructure in Flanders. Archipel is supported by IWT  
(Agency for innovation by Science and Technology).

With Geoffrey C. Bowker, Peter B. Kaufman, Geert Lovink, Viktor Mayer- 
Schönberger, Andrew Payne, Richard Rinehart.

Free entrance. More info & registration: http://events.ibbt.be/archipelmemoriesofthefuture
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