The Messy Edge conference

As Director of Brighton Digital Festival, I developed and curated the Messy Edge (2017-2019).  The Festival's in-house conference was designed to challenge the dominant narratives around digital technology and culture by inviting artists, activists and thinkers from outside of the usual white male perspectives that are over-represented in the conversation. 

The curatorial position came from a place of critical optimism – in that there was a belief in the idea that digital technology can add value to society but that it also needed to be examined critically and not blindly accepted.

The three editions of the Messy Edge were not strictly themed, the speakers tended to be clustered around what I was finding generally interesting at the time. In the broadest sense, they could be thought of as follows -

2017 – I’d been reading Donna Haraway’s essay Staying With the Trouble and Lisa Nakamura’s Cybertypes and their thoughts resonated deeply with me - ie the dangers of techno evangelists singing the praises of digital technology and its potential to ‘fix’ things whilst ignoring the socio-cultural problems of the present and in fact replicating them into the future.

2018 – Around this time there was a lot of discussion about the right to be forgotten in online spaces, to have damaging information erased. I was interested in who gets seen in online spaces, who is building them and to what end – who is being excluded?

2019 – I’d become interested in work that was using digital technologies to examine public spaces, to critique or subvert them and to find community within them and to think about how the digital overlay that now exists, shapes our movements and interactions with the ‘real’ world.

 The Messy Edge was the first step in working towards articulating my belief in the activism inherent in bringing together voices that are usually on the margins and by centring them not in siloed categories but as a polyvocal multi perspective whole.