Or Gallery, in partnership with Burnaby Art Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre and Doryphore Independent Curators Society, is pleased to present Underground in the Aether, a symposium responding to the themes of collectivity, selfhood, and communication circuits in the exhibition Hank Bull: Connexion. It will take place Saturday, April 8 (10am – 5pm) at VIVO Media Art Centre, as the closing event for Spring Fever: Vancouver Independent Archives 2017.

Assembling speakers from across Canada, the United States and Europe, Underground in the Aether launches itself into the entanglements of technology, fantasy and sociality as engaged by an informal and international community of artists from the 1960s to present day.

Seizing upon the terminology behind our present network economy, keynote speaker Hannah B. Higgins, Professor of Art History, University of Illinois (Chicago) presents Aether/Or: The Place of Things and Beings in the Eternal Network, proposing a rehabilitation of these terms following their use by artists in the 1960s. Presentations by Vincent Bonin (Montreal), Allison Collins (Vancouver), Luis Jacob (Toronto), Jee-Hae Kim (University of Cologne) and Felicity Tayler (University of Toronto), will respectively investigate the stakes and sources behind artists’ turn to the imaginary during times of crisis, how forms, identities and communities are transmuted as they circulate through networks, and how artists’ subcultures convened within mainstream and national communications circuits.

With the underground transposed into the aether all is up in the air: upturned and diffuse, yet also also aloft, unfixed and in movement. Together these presentations look to artists’ practices as a means to consider possible ways of living in and through mediation today.

Free and open to the public. Wheelchair accessible. Lunch and refreshments served.

Project website for programme and biographies: https://www.doryphore.ca/aether

Updates can be found on the event’s Facebook Page / (or info@doryphore.ca)

Organized by Joni Low and Robin Simpson (Doryphore Independent Curators Society) with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Burnaby Art Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre and Or Gallery.