“as art collapses into science, centralised control dissipates into networks, and culture migrates beyond man, the old models of explanation, classification and discussion are rendered obsolete.”

Virtual Futures 1996

The University of Warwick’s Virtual Futures conferences occurred in 1994, 1995 and 1996 attracting 300 attendees in 1994 and an even greater number the following year.

The conferences questioned the future possibility of the ‘virtual’ and alluded towards the impact of emerging technologies on society and culture. It was, at its time, revolutionary. I aim to conduct research into this conference to discover what was predicted, what was unpredictable and what was overlooked – but has now become part of everyday virtual culture.

The topics discussed at the conferences in the 90’s included chaos theory, geopolitics, feminism, nanotechnology, cyberpunk fiction, machine music, net security, military strategy, plastic surgery, hacking, bio-computation, cognition, cryptography & capitalism. These topics are still poignant today with perhaps the addition of genetics, bio-engineering, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, bio-ethics and social media. However, with the current WikiLeaks scandal, it seems net-security is still at the forefront of a virtual agenda.

The aim is to create a digitally immersive conference on Warwick Campus re-exploring and re-investigating themes from a time when the internet had not yet entered the public consciousness.

This conference will be unique in not just looking forward, to possible future trends, but also retrospectively looking back at the progression of the last 15 years, questioning its efficacy and thus discovering how these techno-cultural changes have affected our conceptions of what it means to be human, and how or if they will continue to do so.