It’s no longer books and films, articles, peformance, speeches, pamplets and the many ways we understood communication in terms of its format. Now, it’s all just content. But what does it contain? Thoughts that grow, evolve and influence us, or messages that get endlessly replayed? Our content is inspired by the history of ideas, the relationship between ideas and actions across time and place.
Dialogues: Plato’s The Republic is set at a party at the house of Polemarchus, following the annual festival of the Thracian goddess Bendis, where Socrates and his companions fall into a discussion about justice and the just society. Our dialogues also combine art, socialising, food and debate to explore the nature of the digitised society.
- Sample Dialogue: After watching Roddy’s Doyle’s play Two Pints at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, we ate at Elephant and Castle in Temple Bar and discussed authenticity, intent, the universal and the unique, and Nigella Lawson.
Articles: We write plenty about digitisation. These essays are short attempts to highlight some aspects of digitisation that we find interesting. We have a more thorough and rigorous analyis of the digitised society in our ideas section. Our articles fall under the following broad headings:
- Art for What’s Sake: What kind of art is possible in a digital society? Not just art forms, but what kinds of artists (are they even human?) and audiences will there be? Will art serve the same purpose that it has done for centuries?
- Digital Human: Is the Digital Society defined by the interaction of human beings and the environment they occupy and have created by their collective action, or is a human being+machine now the unit around which identity, rights, legal identity and meaning revolve?
- Networked Personality: We’ve always been social, but the digital society seems to have created the paradox of constant contact and alienation. We have no shortage of channels for communication, self-expression and re-invention, and yet authenticity, credibility and dependability seem to be increasingly elusive.
- Manifesto: What are the principles of freedom, of choice in Digital Society? How do we recognise these rights – can we turn to our artists to inspire us and preserve our dignity and independence? Do we need a manifesto to rally around so that we still have the power of free choice – or is the idea that we can have a local cultural identity to defend passé?
Podcasts: Our podcast series features extended discussions with artists, technologists, business people, policy makers and intellectuals who have something to say or are interested in enquiring into the nature of social, political, cultural and personal digitisation.
Snippets: Sometimes, you get good stuff even though it’s not a complete argument or expression of something. It’s just a moment, captured.