Monday, May 9

The As Yet Impossible Symposium

For today and tomorrow I have been and will be a volunteer facilitator for a symposium at the Lowry entitled The As Yet Impossible (TAYI)

TAYI is a two day event which is focusing on the future. The participants are a number of experts in their field which range from performance practitioners, artists, designers, animators, producers, scientists, physicists and so on. The overarching concept is to think of what we, as yet, cannot achieve by means which are available to us through technology.

Today's main focus seems to be how we can change what and how much we experience through our senses. What the future of our senses might be, what augments can we make to them. How our senses are effected when one is lost or disabled, how our senses can be tricked or employed in a different way. The exploration of these topics was done using none-typical means for what you might expect a symposium to use. A series of workshops ran throughout the day which delved into the subject of sense, art, technology, nature, the future, the present, society etc and there is more to come tomorrow.

My role today was to blog about what was going on, to (try and) consolidate the information being fed back to the central hub (where I was stationed) for publication online.

It was very difficult, I could tell from the information I was receiving that the session facilitators were witnessing an almost stream of conciousness as the academics discussed such complex topics. It was exciting to be there at a time when these ideas were in their infancy, and being discussed by the bright thinkers of their respective disciplines. Having the mix of scientists, creators, performers and so on in attendance meant we could discover new ideas in such succession, it made it hard to clearly get the information into print.

Tomorrow will be more focused on the future, on where we can go without technology and how we want, or whether we want it to augment or diminish how we interact with our us and our environment.

Follow the event on its blow, www.theasyetimpossible.wordpress.com where you can find the information from today and subsequent publication of information for the remainder of the event. You can also view live tweets from the event on its blog page, or on the page of the events tweeter, Hannah Nicklin.

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