I was one of the artists speaking at the Academic Photography in Higher Education conference in Norwich on 20th July 2017. The APHE doesn’t seem to be active anymore but I found a skeleton of the registration page on archive.org, a YouTube playlist of some of the talks and a poster (below).
‘Human Interfaces: Borderless (Dis)Connections and Disrupted Futures’, is the Association for Photography in Higher Education’s three-day summer conference. This year’s theme addresses the complexities of how and what it means to be human now, exploring the functions, affects and dynamics of how identity is constructed through narratives, histories and social geography; through the exploration of relationships between communities and individuals, between power and empowerment, nature and nurture and representations of the human condition through technology – between the ‘real’ world, a digitally networked one and the space in-between.
The conference looks specifically at the disruptions and slippages that occur between positions, people, territories and contexts. As the world and higher education become increasingly connected / disconnected and we embark upon unchartered territory, who do we hear, who do we listen to, how do we learn and share, what does this mean for the University? It is in these disruptions and unreliable narratives, where memory and histories are fabricated, in the holes and gaps, the truths, the lies and how these shift, adapt or translate that tell us what it is to be human.
I was invited as part of a contingent of artists and researchers from Birmingham Open Media and talked about my forthcoming work Instructions for Humans.
My actual talk doesn’t seem to have been recorded but I was also on a roundtable panel which was.
(If I recall correctly there was a travel budget but not a hotel budget, and no direct trains from Birmingham to Norwich, so we drove, leaving at 5am. This hopefully explains any incoherence in the video.)
