The virtual part of this event will be set in a digital desert environment that references The Chance Event that took place in the Nevada desert in the late 1990s. This was organised by writer/filmmaker Chris Kraus and brought numerous philosophers, artists and musicians together to investigate the mystery of chance.
At The Showroom, speakers will create fictional avatars (in the form of 3D files) that will be imported into a digital desert. Avatars will be based on identifying with the ‘cyborg girl’, drawing from the feminist perspective of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (first published 1983) and ideas from the French collective Tiqquin’s Theory of The Young Girl (first published 1999). All avatar information will be fed into the desert environment, creating a new form of event that is both symposium and role-playing game/chance encounter.
Over the course of the event, each of the avatars (speakers) will discuss one piece of artwork they would like to ‘save’ within the symposium’s digital environment. The file will end up looking like a video game set in the desert where documented conversations from the event will remain as an archive, storing both the avatars and their selected artworks.
