Another World
April 6–10, 2021
The 2021 Max Wasserman Forum: Another World brings together artists, educators, and writers at the forefront of discourses on art in the digital realm to share their deep understandings and perspectives on digital media’s potential for more radical, imaginative, and limitless forms of cyber expressions. This online reimaging of the Wasserman forum presents two pre-recorded panels that look further into ideas of power and building with a particular interest in the merging and fluidity between the human and artificial experience, contemplating the nature of humanity in light of our current climate. The forum culminates with a live stream closing keynote with Hito Steyerl.
Online pre-recorded panel discussions
April 6-10, 2021
Closing keynote address live stream with Hito Steyerl
Saturday, April 10, 2021 at 3pm EST
Accessibility
This online program will be a combination of pre-recorded video content with closed captioning and uses Zoom with live closed-captioning for livestream with closing keynote.
This program is free but registration is required. Register here.
Panel 1: What are we Building?
Panelists: Salome Asega, Rindon Johnson, and Lawrence Lek
Moderated by Eunsong Kim
What does another world look like in a time when we are all thrust into a space of rethinking, remaking, and reimagining? Speculative provocations become easier to believe if rooted in real life possibilities. Embedded in the constructs of the digital realm, there is a greater sense of freedom to visualize speculative thinking for viewers. These panelists are extraordinarily creating visual systems that reinvent and propose alternative approaches to a defaulted way of living. This discussion will reveal proposals of human evolution as we leave the structures of our built environment and reconsider the possibilities available to manage anonymity. What do we want to embrace? What new models are we building? How does what we are building shape how communities are being defined and organized? How do we bridge imagined thinking into the world of now?
Panel 2: What are the Barriers?
Panelists: American Artist and Lauren Lee McCarthy
Moderated by Gloria Sutton
As diffuse and capacious as the concept of digital space remains, it is often defined in opposition to spaces and exchanges in real life (IRL) making distinctions between online and offline living extremely fluid. How porous are these boundaries as the merging of human and artificial experience by choice or necessity become more commonly embraced? Today as in person social interactions are curtailed and we have become more reliant on online forms of exchange and communication, we have become more aware of the ways the digital reflects and in some cases expands issues of access IRL. Limitations of digital forms, inequity to access, and the limitations set by institutional frameworks will formulate this discussion. These panelists will convene together to consider societal, cultural, institutional and cognitive barriers that form our digital behaviors and inform our digital spaces. What are the barriers, what are the rules that we are abiding by and why do we continue to do so? How do these barriers shape how we interact with one another? This session brings together artists that challenge and critically reflect on creative strategies utilized to push the boundaries to inform another world of possibilities.
About the Max Wasserman Forum
The Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art was established in memory of Max Wasserman (MIT Class of 1935), a founding member of the Council for the Arts at MIT. This public forum was endowed through the generosity of the late Jeanne Wasserman and addresses critical issues in contemporary art and culture through the participation of renowned scholars, artists, and arts professionals. The forum is organized and presented by the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
About MIT List Visual Arts Center
The List Visual Arts Center, MIT’s contemporary art museum, collects, commissions, and presents rigorous, provocative, and artist-centric projects that engage MIT and the global art community. The List is a creative laboratory that provides artists with a space to freely experiment and push existing boundaries.
Press inquiries: Mark Linga, mlinga [at] mit.edu
