PRINTtalks

Live talks programme.  

Tweet your questions to our guest speakers over the course of an evening at twitter.com/generatorproj

Monday 26th August, 7-9pm

Dominic Smith presents:

Clichés and the Blank Page: For a Politics of Creativity and Imagination.

What is it to be faced with a blank piece of paper today? From this seemingly trivial question, this paper attempts to arrive at a contemporary politics of creativity and imagination. The key focus is on how technological change has altered our sense of the term ‘blank page.’ Blank pages, I argue, have always been highly coded spaces, capable of offering a variety of opportunities, obstacles and risks to our powers of creativity and imagination. What has changed is that our sense of the term has been metaphorically extended. Today, we can imagine applying the term ‘blank page’ to all manner of software and hardware innovations of computing, from word processor documents and the fields of a search engine, to tablet and mobile phone touch screens. This paper focuses on how such metaphorical extension masks deep changes at the level of ‘coding.’ Different types of blank page are coded differently; the argument of this paper is that proper attention to this issue necessitates a politics – one capable of recognising the different opportunities, obstacles and risks that different types of blank page offer to our powers of creativity and imagination. 

If you are interested in streaming you own live talk, in response to our question on the role of analogue and digital media, please send us an email at printhouse@generatorprojects.co.uk stating what you would like to speak about and when so we can add this to the schedule.

 Alex Niven presents:

‘The opposite of Folk’

Tuesday 27th August

7-9pm