iARTA Participant Ruth West gave a keynote talk for the iConference 2013, held in Fort Worth, February 12 - 15, 2013.

In her keynote talk for the iConference 2013, Ruth West discussed art work that interrogates the challenges of the digital age within cross-disciplinary collaborations to create new kinds of engagement, insight, and cultural forms through hybrid research that blurs boundaries between disciplines in purposeful and productive ways:

"Whether generated by terrestrial observatories, automated genomic sequencing, social media, high-resolution sub-cellular imaging, surveillance video, financial transactions, or the emerging 'quantified self' movement 'big data,' is here to stay. The richness of these massive repositories is such that we can generate an enormous amount of interpretations to address human concerns spanning the personal to the global over an equally wide range of disciplines. Yet the abstraction of nature and culture into vast and abstract data present challenges for the articulation and representation of linkages between the invisible and the visible - the immaterial scale of digital artifacts and the physical scales and dynamic states they represent. We face a crisis of representation."