The 20th century brought a new unity of art, technology and science. Are we approaching a new renaissance and radical change or is it only a continuation of the dada movement and disenchantment with art and modern civilization? The perspective of contemporary art, institutional science or the business involving new technologies radically differs in their evaluation of these trends. Where does the combination of new artistic and scientific practices lead us? Does it is still affirm the artistic creation as the model of all creativity as it was the case in renaissance? Is there a more radical creativity involved in the scientific discovery and the technological invention that in art? Scientific and technological inventions bring more radical the unity that not only merges theoretical and practical knowledge but also our bodies and the inorganic world. They offer a posthumanist future in which evolution could progress in the form of cyborgs and hybrids or even without humans. In renaissance the man lost his dignified place in the cosmic scheme as the image of God, s/he was freed form the universal hierarchy and became a creature capable of all things, a chameleon and a creative creature. Should we then speak of a posthumanist Renaissance and embrace the birth of the nonhumans and inorganic entities that develop new emergent structure and challenge our notion of life and the evolution? Renaissance admired antiquity and old languages and gained it respect by translations cleaned for religious interpretation. How will the new renaissance gain its respect, what does it have to translate? It has its own fascination with a new language of codes that connect us with the complex inorganic world. We are not translating our past but creating a translation of our future.
These three topics of the renaissance universe - art, man, language - have radically changed and now involve new challenges: science, machines and codes. Will they create a new equilibrium or a new hybrid?
Artificial life, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, bioinformatics, memetics, nanotechnology - these are the domains that blur the differences between biology and technology. The difference between what we consider alive and the not alive, natural and artificial, disappears. The notion of the evolution changes in order to integrate these processes and materials that are not organic. Robots interacting in groups, machines capable to learn, computer viruses and other programs disclose the new dimensions of life. These and other forms of non-organic living systems have become a symptom of the fact that biology and technology create a symbiotic relationship. Crucial to the discussion are the generative and creative processes that make up the whole new microcosm or "artificial" ecosystem of autonomous agents, cellular automata, and other software and hardware that are evolving in a time when the same dynamics apply in the field of genetics. What is the relationship of evolution and emergence - the two most significant concepts in the last two centuries? Where do the experiments and the search for new forms of life as well as the symbiosis of the organic and the non-organic lead us? What are the prospects of the world in which the difference between codes and genes will disappear? And what is the role of art in these processes?
P.S. The conference should involve also the use of networking technologies such as moblogging, folksonomies, and customized schedules.