Digital Art and Culture conference set for mid-December

Hundreds of international artists and digerati will converge at the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts Dec. 12 to 15 for DAC 09, the Digital Art and Culture conference organized by UCI Studio Art and Engineering professor and conference director Simon Penny.

This is the first time the international conference, founded in 1998, will be held on the West Coast. The international interdisciplinary conference series involves a variety of fields, including media studies, media art, hyper-textual literature, computer science, cognitive science and human-computer interaction.

The UCI-hosted version of the conference will focus on the “specificities of embodiment and cultural, social and physical location with respect to digital technologies and networked communications,” organizers said in a release.

Themes for this year’s event include “Embodiment and Performativity,” “After Mobile Media,” “Software/ Platform Studies,” “Environment/ Sustainability/ Climate Change,” “Interdisciplinary Pedagogy,” “Cognition and Creativity,” Sex and Sexuality,” “Space-Time of Ubiquity and Embeddedness,” and “Present and Future of Humanist Inquiry in the Digital Field.”

The themes will be discussed by panels of educators and specialists in the arts, computer studies and media studies from universities around the world.

There also will be a concurrent curated exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology and a sound and music event that will link musicians at UCI and UC San Diego, who will perform simultaneously.

More than 400 applications were submitted; 100 people were accepted to make presentations at the conference.

For more information, visit dac09.uci.edu.