Symposium - Rethinking Our Futures: Art and Collaboration

Prompted by the current challenges of curatorial practices in digital art, this international conference aims to stimulate collective reflection about collaborative strategies, joint approaches and new technology's potential for the presentation of works. Conceived by Molior as a dialogical laboratory, the event brings together fifteen curators from varied backgrounds who will draw on two series of publicly accessible talks in order to develop conceptual and practical avenues to better situate today's issues, notably in the pandemic context, and to clear paths for a more empathetic, supportive and ethical future in the digital art field.

At the outset, six introductory presentationswill mark the beginning of the event via its website. In the manner of a glossary, this initial series seeks to provide theoretical points of reference to launch some of the symposium's main themes (AI, underrepresented communities, environmental crisis, etc.). The event will continue over the ensuing weeks with three live talks, presented as conversations between speakers, to whom the audience may send questions via our streaming platform.

As for the participating curators, these presentations and talks will provide plural perspectives that will be an impetus for, on the one hand, an open forum and, on the other, more intimate conversation workshops. In light of these exchanges, the event will be punctuated by a wrap-up discussion with the audience, as well as by a publication which will be inscribed and developed on the event's website. This will make it possible to consult the profiles and reflections of the participating curators, to which other contributions related to the discussed issues will be added.

Overall, this event aims to integrate a collaborative and processual logic in its structure and deployment with a view to foreground emergent ideas and trace the key threads running through them over the course of the presentations and discussions. Beyond a conceptual imperative, we are convinced that the practical experience of each participant will enrich the symposium's theoretical components, and thereby give more substance to the issues we wish to broaden. It is thus with an assumed experimental and transversal approach that we invite you to reflect with us on current matters in the digital art sphere.