In today’s creative landscape, digital technology has blurred the boundaries between an artwork’s physical and virtual existence. Aesthetica’s Future Now Symposium 2019 offers insight from leading practitioners into art’s radical new possibilities.

Art has been fast to respond to the possibilities of the information age and global connectivity. Whilst the Symposium offers a welcome opportunity for artists to make face-to-face networking connections, it is also alive to the liberating potential of technology for the arts.

The Art of Connectivity (Friday 8 March, 14:45-15:45) is the theme for a discussion by Clarice Hilton and Jamila Prowse, representing visual arts organisation SPACE’s new Art + Technology programme, a platform for the exchange of ideas between artists and thinkers engaged with technology. Artist-in-residence Clarice Hilton has been working on the phenomenon of the “algorithmic self” – how we interact on a daily basis with algorithms, and how this may feed back into our own self-perception.

The importance of virtual reality and environments which owe their existence to computer code to the future of the arts comes into focus in the discussion Evolution of Code: VR and Data-Influenced Artwork (Friday 8 March). From galleries and museums to the cinema, the environments in which people encounter art are increasingly using VR and media arts to transform the experience into a form of immersive artwork. Gazelli Art House, Goldsmiths University, Harmony Studios, London College of Communication and the University of York join the panel to discuss if this can lead to greater inclusivity.

Future Now runs 7-8 March at York St John University. For more information or to book, click here.

Lead image: Victoria Wareham, Midnight Runners, 2018.