CONFERENCE FEEDBACK
The conference organising team would be grateful if delegates would take the time to complete and return our short feedback form. Doing so will help us improve the quality of any further Making Futures events.
Please email form to conference@plymouthart.ac.uk or fax to 01752 203455 or post to Sandra Scholey, Plymouth College of Art, Tavistock Place, Plymouth, Devon. PL4 8AT
2009 MAKING FUTURES CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
Please click on the link below to download a document version.
2009 MAKING FUTURES CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
STREAM DESCRIPTIONS
CONCURRENT SESSION A (Day 1) and D (Day 2) - Local global translations and dialogues
This session examines the tensions and flows expressed in craft making and craft artifacts in the "post colonial" contexts of contemporary global capitalism and its possible futures. Ethical and sustainable craft issues were explored in relation to the new sensibilities emerging as a result of the movements and stresses between traditional cultures and modernity; between rural and urban cultures; between local, regional, national and global levels of interaction and translation; between notions of authenticity, cultural heritage and identity derived under the influence of Western and Non-Western markets, aesthetics and agencies.
CONCURRENT SESSION B (Day 1) and E (Day 2) - Socio-technological and material discourses
This session examines the relationship of craft practices to "post-industrial" modes of design, making, marketing and consumption along with emerging reactions to mass production, de-skilling and consumption (ie in "slow design", the cult of the "imperfect" and "amateurism"). As such explored the discourse between traditional craft making and advanced scientific and technological models which, emerging in the context of global capital, are characterised by their mobility, adaptability, customability, and speed of operation. The opportunities presented by these new modus operandi were explored in relation to the notion that traditional approaches can provide the frameworks for more ecologically sustainable practices.
CONCURRENT SESSION C (Day 1) - Critical perspectives on post-industrial futures
This session revolves around a series of historically informed critical-cultural perspectives that will seek to define the position of contemporary crafts in relation to political economies of industrialisation and to a possible post-industrial future in which environmental sustainability becomes a key (if not singularly the key) paradigm. It discussed whether this post-industrial future necessarily implies a return to some pre-industrial form of craft-based past; and whether Modern subjectivity, structured around a technocratic utopianism performed through the media of advanced market consumption can reconfigure around a post-consumer desire for a more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable mode of being.
CONCURRENT SESSION F (Day 2) - Responses, redefinitions & respositionings
This session explores some of the ways in which craft practitioners are imaginatively responding to public dialogues around sustainability issues, especially through the "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" rubric. It will examine the way makers, as individual craftspeople, members of collectives and as designed makers, are redefining the contemporary crafts as a means to empower self and others to gain a critical awareness of the habitat, and to engage in grassroots activism and community participation. As such the session heard from a number of concrete projects that seek to extend product life, to employ found objects, to reclaim and recycle refuse, to adopt second hand "upcycling" strategies and to incorporate concepts of collaborative authorship.
CONCURRENT SESSION G (Day 2) - Endangered subjects - ethical minds
This session explores social equality and environmental sustainability in the context of crafts education and curriculum design. Despite the frequently asserted transformative value of purposive emdodied engagement with material processes as a basis for ethical and sustainable living, crafts education is undergoing something of a crisis and craft-based disciplines in the UK art school system are, for example, now considered "endangered subjects". Why might this be so? Can a crafts-based education designed with ethical and environmental stewardship at its core help address this condition? If possible, what practical measures and means might help identify and transfer the essential kinds of sustainability information and goals to be imparted?
