Concepts for change: Representation, community and the transformative power of technology [program]

"The seminar considered what was seen as an impasse in the way we think about non-metropolitan areas in Australia, and their relation with the forces that are currently reshaping the world. The impasse involves a stubborn refusal to think beyond the centre/periphery model that places the metropolis as the source, and the periphery as the beneficiary of change. The effect of this type of thinking is to lock regional domains into a passive, recipient mode of existence, or alternatively as the space of a recalcitrant ‘other', a place of difference that exists only as a means of identifying the ‘normal' self of the centred metropole. These concepts may be focussed around ideas of the virtual, the network, the image, issues of representation, aesthetics and arts practice, narrative interventions, media constructions of community and regionality, questions of history and the institutionalisation of memory, global-local interconnections. Drawn from a range of disciplines and areas of research and other experiences, these concepts will need the critical and analytical power to submit values and received ideas to scrutiny, and to generate new arrangements and assemblages of ideas and various mediated experiences. The seminar will focus on (i) submitting the existing idea of the ‘bush’ as the historically established motif of regionality to critical scrutiny, and (ii) to exploring new and imaginative ways of redefining regionality through the employment of technologies in media and art."