Moana view in Ars Electronica Festival
AUT academics will host Moana Digitalities: a talanoa to consider digital spaces’ role in creating a more equitable and inclusive future for Moana communities as part of the 2021 Ars Electronica Festival, taking place online and in-person in Linz, Austria, from 8 – 12 September.
Moana Digitalities is part of the Architecting Global Communities. It brings interdisciplinary artist Dr Nooroa Tapuni and author, art critic, editor and multidisciplinary researcher Dr Lana Lopesi together, hosted by Associate Professor Dr Janine Randerson, and explores what can digitalisation offer Moana communities towards a more equitable and inclusive future.
In this talanoa, Drs Tapuni and Lopesi converse on their respective practices as non-cis male and part of the digital native generation, in Aotearoa New Zealand and in Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the South Pacific diaspora.
In interdisciplinary media projects such as self-portrait-tetai an(other), Nooroa Tapuni’s artwork explores the extent to which the Mangaian concept of continuum can be expressed across digital and physical spaces. Tapuni’s artworks create an environment where the observer, researcher and artwork become conduits within a continuum, where other is same.
Lana Lopesi argues that a digital native generation of Moana artists have positioned themselves away from the narratives of displacement and nonbelonging featured in the Moana art of previous generations, imagining their subjectivity in globally routed, yet locally rooted, ways. She discusses the Pacific Legacy Project as a digital first kind of anti-art history.
Lana and Nooroa are both researchers in the Vā Moana / Pacific Spaces research cluster at AUT University – an international research platform engaging Pacific and Western thought to investigate Vā Moana, Pacific spaces. This talanoa considers both the divisive and connective potential of online spaces and media artworks for social change.
The 2021 Ars Electronica Festival will take place from September 8 to 12, 2021. To contain the spreading of the COVID-19-virus, on the one hand there will be offered events in Linz for the local audience in Austria. On the other hand, museums, universities, labs and galleries worldwide will be part of the festival through on-site and online-programs.
View the full programme.