John Naughton (CRASSH) in conversation with Sheila Hayman (BAFTA award-winning filmmaker)

How might the concept of performance help us think through the implications, or itself be suggested by, a digital world? 

12 October 2015, 5-7pm

Room SG1, Alison Richard Building

John Naughton, a columnist for the Observer since 1987, is author of two well-known histories of the Internet: A Brief History of the Future (2000) and From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet(2012). John’s seminal work explores the changes in our information ecosystem brought about by technological change
(http://www.digitalhumanities.cam.ac.uk/directory/johnnaughton).  He is also a Senior Research Fellow at CRASSH (Cambridge Centre for Digital Knowledge,Technology, Democracy and the Digital Society and Director of the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy), Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, and was Vice-President of Wolfson College from 2011-2015.

Sheila Hayman spent a decade watching the future reframe itself as the digital world developed. Her documentary series, ‘A Short History of the Future’ traced the origins of our shared vision of a future shaped by technology (teleporters, videophones, self-driving cars, silver zoot suits, skyscraper buildings): ‘The Electronic Frontier’ showed how digital technology was already, in 1992, changing that shared future, as the solid certainties of the physical world dissolved into the virtual. She will show and discuss clips from these and other documentaries. 

Open to all.  No registration required
Part of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CIPN), series

Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk