Conferences
Virtual Futures saw a group of renegade philosophers lock horns with the future based on the provocations of evidence provided by the emergence of the Internet. Their predictions were wild, exerted creative licence and were unfaithful to every academic discipline. Yet the University of Warwick events of 1994, 1995 and 1996 had a significant impact on the lives and careers of many of the speakers. Alumni include a range of successful columnists, journalists (for The Telegraph, Guardian, Wired Magazine), academics, artists, authors, designers, scientists, software developers and technology consultants.
The first Virtual Futures conference took place in 1994, and gained recognition almost instantly. Dubbed the “Glastonbury of cyberculture”, the revolutionary event attracted speakers from many fields. Its popularity grew in 1995 and over 800 people attended. Soon it evolved into a unique, international event. Virtual Futures was more than ‘interdisciplinary,’ and went beyond mere commentary: at Virtual Futures, the morphing of cultural space was accelerated by the head-on collision of science, theory, music, fiction, and multimedia.
Highlights from the 90’s events included a live demonstration of computer controlled body parts, music and video-enhanced presentations from internationally renowned theorists, a series of films in the University of Warwick’s Arts Centre cinema, talks from leading authorities on new scientific paradigms of complexity and non-linearity and guided tours of revolutionary virtual reality environments.
The presentations were unique as they were some of the first to be accompanied by films, music, slides and digital graphics with every speaker offering new and exciting perspectives on what may await us in the near future. Virtual Futures was a catalytic site for the meeting and cross-fertilisation of new ideas, new media and new technologies.
Virtual Futures 1994
May 6-8, 1994 | University of Warwick
The first cyberphilosophy conference held at the University of Warwick in 1994.
Virtual Futures 1995
May 25-28, 1995 | University of Warwick
Virtual Futures 1995 was a three-day conference held at the Philosophy department of the University of Warwick in May 1995, inspired by the neomaterialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Described at the time as the Glastonbury of cyberculture, it was by the standards of academic conferences a massive event: nearly a hundred speakers gave papers, and just short of a thousand people packed into the main auditorium for the Saturday evening session. The topics discussed included chaos theory, cybernetics, geopolitics, feminism, nanotechnology, cyberpunk fiction, machine music, net security, military strategy, plastic surgery, hacking, biocomputation, cognition, cryptography & capitalism.
Virtual Futures 1996
May 3-5, 1996 | University of Warwick
Virtual Futures, now in its third year, has grown from a small conference in ’94 into a unique, international event.
Virtual Futures 2011
June 18-19, 2011 | University of Warwick
When the Virtual Futures conference returned to Warwick, on the 18th and 19th June 2011, it aimed to reconnect audiences with one of the most important intellectual and cultural developments of our times – the technological extension of the human condition, and served to raise awareness about the continuing significance of the issues addressed by the original conferences.