I’m about to head off to another Culturemondo Roundtable and the Wooster Collective posts a timely set of street art from Italian artist Filippo Minelli.
“Facebook”, spray paint on scrap-yard, Bamako – Mali, 2008
Minelli’s Contradictions series, as a short interview on Wooster explains, illuminates the techno-social environment where –
“users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions. And this aspect works for the social-networks too. The idealization connected with these experiences provokes a small-but-important detach of the perception of reality and what i want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies.”
The last Culturemondo meeting was held in Cuba and focussed on the Americas. It was a timely reminder of the very uneven distribution of digital content and culture, and the ‘alternative modernities‘ under globalisation.
This one takes place in Taipei. The focus, much like Cuba, is on skill and strategy-sharing between those involved with large scale cultural portals (in the broadest sense), web strategists and digital culture policy makers. This time, though, the Culturemondo roundtable focusses on the Asia-Pacific and the stellar set of projects emerging from this region, as well as new initiatives in Africa and India.
I will be blogging the event as it happens here on Fresh & New so stay tuned next week for reports as the action, ideas, and conversations unfold.