Foraging Media Symposium

Foraging Media

Join us at the Harry Clarke Lecture Room, at National College of Art and Design for Foraging Media, a symposium bringing together artists and researchers to discuss ecology, materialism and media. The event responds to an emergent field of artists’ practice and media theory: that is, practitioners working with finite or perceived to be ‘obsolete’ media that have to be ‘foraged’ and maintained within small-scale DIY, community-based cultures of repair and recycling.

Keynote speakers are Dr Kim Knowles author of Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, 2020, Dr Abelardo Gil-Fournier, co author with Jussi Parikka of Living Surfaces: Images, Plants and Environments of Media ( 2024) and artist and filmmaker Dr Karel Doing author of Ruins and Resilience: the Longevity of Experimental Film (2024).Foraging Media is supported by the NUI, NCAD Research and the Media Department, School of Fine Art, NCAD and convened by Sarah Durcan, Cliona Harmey, Chloe Brenan and Claire Nidecker.

Foraging is associated with analogue photochemical 16mm film practices but also includes media practitioners working with DIY approaches to digital media such as open source coding and ‘green hacking’. Foraging and frugal media practices value slower, sustainable cultures based in community and environment in contrast to neo-liberal capitalist cultures of consumerism and built in obsolescence. These ecologically minded practices emphasise the specificity of the artwork’s location and encounters with audiences in smaller localities and communities as opposed to large-scale streaming platforms.

The symposium is accompanied by a screening of a selection of 16mm films, by Dr Karel Doing made using phytography. Dr Karel Doing will also lead a Phytography Workshop on Tuesday 5th November (see Foraging Media for booking). Phytography is a technique that combines plant chemistry with photography: ‘human and non-human media collide and combine within phytographic practice, opening up a shared space between people and plants’.

Host or Publisher Frugal Media Research Group