BORDER CONTROL: 2019 New Media Caucus Symposium and Exhibition

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The New Media Caucus proudly announces the 2019 Symposium and Exhibition, Border Control, at the University of Michigan, Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and the Stamps Gallery.

Borders and boundaries, both tangible and ephemeral, are closely tied to the ways in which humanity has always made sense of the world, and of its place in it. Our current moment is one in which this certainty is being undermined as many borders are being challenged and contested. Borders can be mental, physical, geographical, political, social, ethical, legal, economic, environmental, digital, real, imagined, visceral, and emotional.

How do you navigate borders in your own practice or research? The New Media Caucus seeks to bring together artists and scholars to critically engage relevant topics. Some of the processes calling contemporary borders into question are:

• Climate change is rapidly collapsing even our most basic understanding of the world, as the ecosystems around us are transformed, shifted, and even extinguished at an unparalleled pace.
• Accepted notions of demographic, political and economic boundaries are called into question by displaced populations and algorithmic filter bubbles.
• Techno-scientific developments and new philosophical concepts challenge the separation of human from non-human life and intelligence.
• Intersectional discourses which contest existing categorizations and hierarchies of gender, race, ability and class.