Date: 28.11.2022

Time: 9.30 - 19.00     *Registration starts at 9.20

** Hong Kong Time (UTC +8)

Venue: Miller Theater, Asia Society Hong Kong Center + online live streaming

Language: English

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Rundown and speakers' abstracts >> HERE

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Globalisation has meant, historically, a process of neutralization through economic and technological means by conquering land, sea and air. The invention and proliferation of digital technologies in the second half of the 20th century has accelerated this process. Digital technology has become the most pervasive and ubiquitous medium now indispensable to everyday life. Both the state and capitalism demand and produce techno-social subjects – who are consumers, but not citizens. We recognize that technology is not neutral. It is a new regime of discipline and containment based on computation, which has brought us convenience as well as platform capitalism, enforced surveillance and mass data extraction.

As a way to counter this homogenization, we have to imagine a new form of globalisation, to imagine a techno-diversity or multiple cosmo-technics, by resolving the antinomy of the universality of technology. To include people in different localities to participate in the production and sharing of knowledge, and allowing them to actively appropriate technology instead of being reduced to mere consumers. This is essential to maintaining a local heterogeneity as well as politicizing the innovation and employment of technology, which allows us to resist against a homogenization assumed by capitalist logic and the technocratic.

To bring forward a new phase of globalization means going beyond the previous unilateral process of globalization and the technological dystopia accompanied with it. It requires rediscovering and inventing new configurations between cultures and technologies, tradition and modernism, east and west. It is a call that not only addresses politologists but scholars in art and humanities, as well as those in engineering and sciences. It demands a re-evaluation of the limits and potential of the current algorithmic culture and its algorithmic governmentality from new perspectives.

This Symposium invites scholars and artists to conceive such possibilities by reflecting on the conceptual and practical contributions from both the East and the West. We hope this will contribute in overcoming the universalist and homogeneous idea of technology, which impoverishes our capacity to think and act.

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