New Futures: Innovations in arts and Science

public talks by Dr Keith Armstrong and Dr Angus Hervey on Friday, 19 February 2016 at 18:00
Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Reservoir

Presented as part of the Programme for Innovation in Artform Development (PIAD), an initiative by the Vrystaat Arts Festival and the University of the Free State. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Kindly hosted by the Friends of Oliewenhuis Art Museum.

Re-Future
by Dr Keith Armstrong

Keith Armstrong is an experimental artist profoundly motivated by issues of social and ecological justice. His engaged, participative practices provoke audiences to comprehend, envisage and imagine collective pathways towards sustainable futures. He has specialised for more than 20 years in collaborative, experimental practices with emphasis upon innovative performance forms, site-specific electronic arts, networked interactive installations, alternative interfaces, art-science collaborations and socially and ecologically engaged practices.

Keith's research asks how insights drawn from scientific and philosophical ecologies can help us to better invent and direct experimental art forms, with the understanding that art practitioners can also act as powerful provocateurs in the long journey towards sustainable futures. Through inventing radical research methodologies and processes, he has led and created over 60 major art works and process-based projects, which have been shown internationally, supported by numerous grants from the public and private sectors.

The Art (and Science) of Optimism: why the future is much better than you think
by Dr Angus Hervey

Dr Angus Hervey is a writer, technologist and science communicator. He is the co-founder of Future Crunch, a platform for intelligent thinking about the future of science and technology, and the current Australian manager of Random Hacks of Kindness, a global initiative started in 2009 by Google, IBM, Microsoft, NASA and the World Bank to create open-source technology solutions to social challenges. He is the former manager of Global Policy, one of the world's leading international political journals, and holds a Masters degree in International Political Economy and a PhD in Government from the London School of Economics, where he was also the Ralph Miliband Scholar between 2009 and 2012.

For more information, please contact the Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery, UFS at 051 401 2706 or dejesusav@ufs.ac.za