AMY WINKLER/Arizona Daily Wildcat Art assistant professor Carol Flax, left, and media arts visiting assistant professor Lucy Petrovich are co-chairs of the upcoming Digital Arts Symposium on campus. The symposium will welcome keynote speaker Dr. Kevin Warwick, the world's first official cyborg.

Professor of cybernetics has 'Robocop' dreams and digital realities

A cyborg is coming to speak at UA this weekend. He will discuss whether cyborgs will inherit the earth.

Dr. Kevin Warwick will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming digital arts symposium, entitled Neural Net (Work). Warwick, who has been called "Britain's leading prophet of the robot age" by the "X-Files'" Gillian Anderson, is a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, UK, and is the world's first cyborg.

Warwick, who in 1998 and again in March of 2002 implanted a silicone chip transponder into his left arm, stated on his self-titled Web site, "The step to Cyborgs offers humans a natural, technological upgrade in the technological world we have instigated."

Along with Warwick, six other leading experts in the fields of digital technology, art and consciousness, will discuss their own research and developments in this rapidly developing area of interest.

Co-sponsored by the College of Fine Arts and the Center for Consciousness Studies, the symposium will offer exposure to some of the most interesting up-and-coming research in the field of digital arts.

"International and national theorists, artists and researchers will speak on issues of consciousness that are directly related to their digital research," Lucy Petrovich, visiting assistant professor of media arts and co-chair of the symposium, stated in an e-mail interview.

"This symposium will give the UA and the Tucson community the opportunity to have a dialogue with people working in the digital realm in innovative ways," she said. "These speakers are inventing and defining New Media."

Digital technology and art are linked in the symposium, as well as in the emerging digital art world.

"The symposium is an opportunity to see what other people are doing as far as integrating new technologies into their art," Peter Fine, first-year MFA candidate in studio art and visual communication, said. "Technology has always been the thing that has driven new movements in art and design. Technology cannot be separated from art."

Members of the University of Arizona art community expect to see an increase in interest and involvement in the digital field, and the school is attempting to keep pace with global trends by adding such facilities as the Treistman Fine Arts Center for New Media.

"Digital arts at the UA are becoming more important. Here at the Treistman Center, we are trying to make people more aware of the digital arts," Fine said. "(In the near future) we will see more digital arts in all aspects of fine arts. There will be a lot more students interested in pursuing digital media. Technology is becoming so much more a part of our lives."