Saturday 14 June, 12 – 5.40pm
The Way We Act Now: Psychology and Behaviour in the Digital Age

The first event in our Futurecamp series explores how behaviour and human interactions have been radically affected and changed by the impact of the digital and Internet revolutions. With contributions from Dr Stefana Broadbent, Jesse Darling, Cécile B Evans, Shana Moulton, Rachel Reupke, Dr Kathleen Richardson, Erica Scourti and Frances Stark.

The first event in our Futurecamp series includes contributions from Dr Stefana Broadbent, Jesse Darling, Cécile B Evans, Shana Moulton, Rachel Reupke, Dr Kathleen Richardson, Erica Scourti and Frances Stark.

Premise of the event:

Behaviour and human interactions have been radically affected and changed by the impact of the digital and Internet revolutions – causing dramatic changes that we are still living through. The pleasure of our networked lives is played out publicly via social networks of image and text, and the immediate access to information and entertainment this enables is now considered essential.

However, the anxiety caused by living in this network of constant communication mean many of us work all hours of the day via smart phones and tablets. Alongside this, our emotions are now instrumentalised via technology and the virtual world and we experience relationships and emotions through a screen.

This event will be live streamed from 12noon-2.15pm. Writer Jessica Lack will live blog throughout. Check Facebook for updates on both.

Event schedule:

12pm: Welcome and introduction from Wysing Curators Kathy Noble and Gareth Bell-Jones

12.10pm: Dr Stefana Broadbent, Digital Anthropology at University College will present aspects of her research in relationship to the psychological and behavioural affects that occur in our personal communication, as a result of the digital world we live in today.

12.40pm: Dr Kathleen Richardson, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Department of Anthropology, University College London will present Digital Social Networking: A Collective Out of Body Experience?, exploring the rise of digital social networking as a dissociative practice; in that studies of social networking are focused on what people say is happening, rather than what is happening when people interact via machines.

1.10pm: Open Discussion followed by a break with refreshments available

1.45pm: Screening of AGNES (the end is near), 2014, by Cécile B Evans followed by a discussion with Kathy Noble, Wysing Curator about AGNES; a bot - an automated programme - that lives on the Serpentine Gallery's website.

2.15pm: Habeas Corpus Ad Subjiciendum, or Body of Work? You're Looking At It powerpoint, text. (2013), a performance lecture by Jesse Darling.

2.45pm: Screening of Rachel Reupke’s Wine & Spirits (2013),a film about alcohol and romance, and the rituals that link the two. In a hybrid of real life observation and advertising image, a man and a woman meet for a drink in a series of scenes in which physical gesture and verbal disjuncture are emphasised by the absence of sound. 

Screening of Life in AdWords (2012-13) by Erica Scourti; a project in which Scourti wrote and emailed her daily diary to her Gmail account and then performed to a webcam the list of suggested keywords linking to clusters of relevant ads, making visible the way we and our personal information are the product in the 'free' internet economy.

Screening of  You Could've Said (2013) by Erica Scourti; made using Google's keyword search-engine to write a confessional text and originally performed live online for Fieldbroadcast . Total 20 mins.

3.20pm: Break – refreshments available

3.30pm:  A new performance by Shana Moulton; as her middle-aged house-wife alter-ego Cynthia

4pm: Screening of My Best Thing (2011) by Frances Stark; a conversation between two online avatars, on a dating website, that develops into a sexual affair between an older woman and a younger man, in this feature length animation – a story which Stark developed from real experiences that occurred between her and others, in online chat rooms. 1hr 40 mins.

5.40pm: Ends. 

Contrbutor biographies:

Dr Stefana Broadbent is a fellow of the new Digital Anthropology programme at University College London. She began her academic life as a developmental psychologist and a cognitive scientist and since 1991 has undertaken ethnographic research on emerging digital practices, using a cognitive anthropological approach. She has spent decades observing people as they use technology both at home and in complex workspaces such as air-traffic control towers and nuclear power plants, looking at the ways we use digital tools to relate and create new social systems. In particular, she focussed on our social expectations regarding giving and receiving, publishing a chapter on Personal Communication in the book Digital Anthropology (2012) edited by Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller. Her current research focuses on the workplace and the social phenomena of digital activities that occur within it.

Jesse Darling is an artist and occasional essayist living and working in London and wherever. S/he works in sculpture, installation, digital, “dasein by design”, and the space in which performance becomes unmediated experience, researching ways to #occupy [and resist] the contested territory of subjectivity, sociality and the physical body. S/he recently completed an MFA at Slade and has exhibited, published and performed internationally. JD is represented by Arcadia_Missa.

Cécile B. Evans is a Belgian American artist based in London and Berlin. She is the 2013 recipient of the Push Your Art Prize with the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), ‘Convention T’, artist in residence at Wysing Arts Centre, Radar commissioned artist (Loughborough), and 2012 recipient of the Emdash Award (Frieze, London). Recent exhibitions include La Voix Humaine (Kunstverein Munich), Bold Tendencies 7 (Peckham) and How To Eclipse the Light (Wilkinson Gallery, London).

Shana Moulton is an artist who grew up near Yosemite, California, and now lives and works in New York and Munich. Over the past ten years she has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of ‘Cynthia’, a middle age woman, who is both a fictional figure and the artist's alter ego. Moulton has had solo exhibitions or performances at The New Museum, SFMOMA, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Palais De Tokyo in Paris, The Migros Museum in Zurich and the Times Museum in Guangzhou.

Rachel Reupke is an artist who lives in London and works primarily with the moving image. Recent videos deal with the idea of worry – worry about health, money, social status and relationships etc. She was awarded a FLAMIN production award from Film London in 2011 and the resulting film Wine & Spirits was shown at Cell Project Space, London in 2013.

Dr Kathleen Richardson is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Richardson has conducted research in the areas of robotics, autism and social networking and publishes the An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines on the study of the culture of robots in January 2015). Kathleen’s core research explores human attachment styles and machines. She held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCL exploring the use of robots for helping children with autism. In 2013 she was a research fellow at CRASSH on the Digital Bridges Project exploring the role of theatre and technology. In 2006 she produced the 1921 play R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) and in 2016 will produce ‘The Universal Robot Project’ a festival exploring what it means to be human. 

Erica Scourti is an artist who was born in Athens, Greece in 1980 and now lives in London. She works with video, performance, online and with text, and has shown internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Museo Reine Sofia, Kunstmuseum Bonn and Jeu de Paume Museum and Kunstverein Munich.

Frances Stark is an artist who was born in Newport Beach, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. She works in many different ways and mediums and has had solo exhibitions at ICA London; Nottingham Contemporary, CRG, New York; The Hammer Musem, Los Angeles; Kunstverein Galerie, Munich; and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne. She is the author of The Architect and the Housewife (Book Works, 1999).

Jessica Lack will live blog this event. Jessica Lack is a freelance arts writer for the Guardian. She was the previews arts editor of The Guide for ten years and now contributes to G2 and the arts and culture section online. She also contributes to various art and culture magazines including Dazed and Confused, ID Magazine and World of Interiors. She was Deputy Editor of Tate Magazine for five years and has published various catalogue essays and art books. She was writer-in-residence at Jerwood in September 2012.