Reviewing the Future: Vision, Innovation, Emergence

Network consciousness, telematic interactivity and the media and metaphors of technology and science, have informed the vision of the Collegium since its inception as CAiiA at the University of Wales College, Newport back in 1994. Throughout the subsequent decade, developments in computing, communications, biophysics and cognitive science, hypermedia, telepresence and robotics created challenges in all fields: architecture, performance, dance, narrative, music, as well as the visual arts and design. New discourse was emerging and theory was not to be left behind. In this context, CAiiA-STAR flourished. As the pressure to expand increased, the Planetary Collegium was established, with its CAiiA-Hub in the University of Plymouth, and Nodes in Zurich, Milan and Beijing, with others pending

This brief outline sets the context of the Planetary Collegium's Summit Meeting of 2007, which will provide the forum for a review of the future. While there will be a celebration of past achievements, the thrust of the Summit Meeting's lectures, workshops, and poster exhibitions will be to strategise individual and collective initiatives that will move our agenda to another level. It is possible to foresee entirely new formations of practice and fields of inquiry growing from the personal and planetary connectivity of the Collegium. Imaginative and informed speculation will welcomed as an essential inspiration to the worlds of the arts, technology and consciousness research. We have always sought to think out of the box, to leap traditional barriers, to extend and re-invent our selves and our practices at every turn. The convergence and mutation of formerly discrete fields of practice will continue.

Our challenge remains: to creatively maintain artistic and ethical integrity at the progressive edge of our various fields, while continuing to prove a vigorous alternative to an art world largely in decline. Developments in the nanofield, biophysics, and quantum computing will undoubtedly inspire new alliances between science and art, to the benefit of both fields. The wisdom of our syncretic approach to research will also lead us to cultures distanced from the prevailing western paradigm. We have much also to offer education. In those many institutions where confusion over the potential of new media arts prevails, we can provide models and methods that will break the roadblocks to creativity. In the time-locked world of galleries and museums, we can revivify the imaginative energy of curators and architects. As always, it will be the deeply human dimensions of technological culture that we shall explore; the values that lie in profound subjectivity, and in experiencing the full spectrum of the sensorium, even into the domains of non-ordinary perception.

The Summit is about agenda building for the art of this century, sharing dreams, identifying emergent practice, and articulating new theory. The Collegium is an international community of artists and scholars working at the highest levels of practice and research that will seek through these public interactions to provide the roadmap to a planetary culture.

Roy Ascott
25 April 2006