Cross Culture – Global Art (Introduction to the Plenary Session)

Abstract

The panels in Cross-Culture--Global Art provide an opportunity to examine cross-cultural influences, the global and the local. New media histories include dramatically different influences and parallels to new media art. Even the definitions of what constitutes new media differ from varied cultural perspectives. This text is a framework that suggests a number of ongoing considerations in the development of new media art. For example, how what are the impacts of narrative structures from Aboriginal and other oral cultures on the analysis and practice of new media? How do notions of identity shift across cultures historically, how are these embedded and transformed by new media practice? How have the different histories of North/South, East/West and the fall of the Wall in the 1980s impacted current scholarship in new media? What culturally different philosophical perspectives can ground our understandings of new media aesthetics? How do globalization and the construction of global contexts such as festivals and biennials affect local new media practices? What strategies can we consider to bring together a larger array of cultural practices in building a new media art history of the future?