VCAS conference stream: 'Artistic Practice in the Age of Technology: Fatigue, Failure, and Resistance'
Part of the MCCT - Midlands Conference in Critical Thought 2026
University of Warwick
May 21st – 22nd, 2026
Concept
This stream explores how emerging technologies reshape creative practice, artistic production, and aesthetic experience. From digital tools and immersive media to collaborative software and networked systems, technology increasingly mediates how artists conceive, create, and circulate their work. These developments raise pressing questions about originality, imagination, and innovation in an age when human creativity is increasingly entangled with technological infrastructures.
Platform aesthetics, standardized toolkits, and algorithmically managed workflows carry the risk of creative homogenization, creating patterns of creative fatigue and normalized practice that may constrain experimentality. At the same time, our deepening involvement with digital technologies also defines the context in which creativity takes place. While the internet offers access to endless sources of inspiration, the incessant stimulation, connectivity, and habitual scrolling of contemporary life mean we rarely sit with our own minds and lose the unstructured, spontaneous moments when flashes of creativity happen. Yet, gamification, data-driven design, and technological collaboration platforms also introduce new types of creative work. Technology, then, both unsettles and expands ideas of authenticity, identity, and cultural perception in creative practice today, as well as challenging inherited models of authorship, work, and value.
This stream calls for contributions that challenge both the potential and the perils of technology for creative work. We aim to bring performances, participatory formats, workshops, and traditional scholarship into shared conversation, inviting cross-disciplinary responses that explore how technological systems are reshaping the creation, circulation, and cultural value of creative work.
VCAS was selected to organise the MCCT conference stream “Artistic Practice in the Age of Technology: Fatigue, Failure, and Resistance.” The stream explores how emerging technologies reshape creative practice, questioning originality, authorship, and the effects of digital fatigue and standardization. It brings together diverse formats to examine how technological systems are transforming the creation and cultural value of artistic work today. The stream will be presented with a hybrid format, both in person and using Zoom.
“I use technology in order to hate it properly. You have to become familiar with something before you can develop a genuine antagonism.”
— Nam June Paik, interview with Calvin Tomkins, 1975
MCCT – Midlands Conference in Critical Thought 2026
Participating Presenters: Ziyao Lin, Nam Huh, Keyki Sun, Liberty Quinn, Patrick Loan, Thomas Nicolaou, Renia Korma, Oliver Cloke, Pragya Bhargava, Anahita Neghabat, Ziegi Boss, Liz Melchor, Robert Good, Laurie Schram, Katia Hay, Stephanie Chessel, Luja Simunovic, Sally Stenton, Lulu Ao
Stream organisers and curators: Renia Korma, Patrick Loan & Ziegi Boss
MCCT
Panel 1: Living Inside Platform Logic: Optimisation, Algorithms, and Digital Slop
Ziyao Lin
How Not to Be Invisible
Nam Huh
Navigating the Networked Archive
Keyki Sun
Fake Bodies, Real Solace
Panel 2: System Failure: Glitches, Breakdowns, and Presence
Liberty Quinn
Interrupted Ice
Patrick Loan
Restricted Drawing: Embracing the Glitch as Creative Method
Panel 3: Navigating Creative Limits: From Fatigue to Innovation
Thomas Nicolaou
The Flowers of Chaucer
Renia Korma
Creative Fatigue and Artistic Blockages as Catalysts for Experimentation and Collaboration in Digital Practice
Panel 4: Against Optimisation: Choosing Uncertainty
Oliver Cloke
How Do Contemporary Technologies Reshape Originality and Cultural Value?
Pragya Bhargava
Taking the Long Way Home
Anahita Neghabat
Until you feel impending doom
Panel 5: Artistic Responses to Technology
Ziegi Boss
Embedded Practice and the Logic of Systems
Liz Melchor
Art, Machine, and Interaction: Human Agency When Technology is the Tool
Robert Good
Mapping Resistance: Towards a Topography of Artistic Responses to Technology
Panel 6: Who Makes the Work? AI, Authenticity, and Invisible Labour
Laurie Schram, Katia Hay, Stephanie Chessel
One and Three SCHRAM’s
Luja Šimunović
Failure as Method of Resistance in Digital Art Practices
Panel 7: Resistance and Experimentation in Practice
Sally Stenton
Devious Dancing with Devices… and Trees
Lulu Ao
Failure as a Condition of Universality
