DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Journal of Media Practice Symposium, 24 June 2011

Hosted by the Digital Cultures Research Centre and the Creative Media Research Group, University of the West of England

This one-day symposium seeks to explore how digital technologies have redefined creativity and media practice within the academy both in terms of teaching and research. Whether or not our research questions and/or curriculum deal directly with the “digital”, those of us involved in creative media practice are inevitably working within a new media landscape in which digital technologies disrupt our received notions of media practice education and research.

Recent debates have challenged the idea that the capacity for creative improvisation is exercised by individuals against the conventions of culture and society. Instead, the suggestion is that improvisation and creativity are intrinsic to the very processes of social and cultural life (Hallam and Ingold 2007). At the same time we are working within a milieu of digital “disruption” (Christensen, 1997) in which rapid developments in the “technologies, economic organization, and social practices of production” have created “new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge, and culture” (Benkler, 2006).

The 2011 Journal of Media Practice symposium wishes to explore the implications of these developments across the field of Media Practice, and to consider the changing context within which we find ourselves teaching and creating media. How are the traditional binaries between different ways of working and different contexts relevant to the contemporary media landscape? In a landscape where “new formulations of knowledge afforded by the web are breaking down the distinctions between the university and the ‘real World’” (Dovey and Lister, 2009), how does media practice sit within the academy in this “postdigital” age (Pepperell and Punt, 2000)? What is now the role of media practice research in the ecosystems of the ‘creative economy’?

Please visit the website for the event for more information: http://postdigi.wordpress.com/