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CALL FOR
PAPERS
REFRESH! FIRST INTERNATIONAL
CONFERENCE ON
THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART, SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY
http://www.mediaarthistory.org
Deadline:
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"The technology
of the modern media has produced new possibilities of
interaction...
What is needed is
a wider view encompassing the coming rewards in the
context
of the treasures
left us by the past experiences, possessions, and
insights."
(Rudolf Arnheim,
Summer 2000)
Recognizing the
increasing significance of media art for our culture, this Conference (Evening of Sept. 28th,
Sept. 29th, 30th, October 1st) on the Histories
of Media Art will discuss for the first time the history of media art within the
interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts of the histories of art. Leonardo/ISAST, Banff New Media
Institute the Database for Virtual Art and UNESCO DigiArts are collaborating to
produce the first international art history conference covering art and new
media, art and technology, art-science interaction, and the history of media as
pertinent to contemporary art.
Held at The Banff
Centre, featuring lectures by invited and selected
speakers, the latter being chosen by an international jury from a call for
papers, the main event will be followed by a two-day summit meeting
(October 2-3, 2005) for in-depth dialogues and international project initiation
(proposals welcome).
For more
information on the conference, please visit:
Papers are
invited from scholars and postgraduates in any relevant discipline, particularly
art history and new media, art and technology, the interaction of art and
science, and media history, are encouraged to submit for the following
sessions:
(Please address
your proposals to the sessions with the Priority A to
C)
I. After photography,
film, video, and the little known media art history of the 1960s-80s, today
media artists are active in a wide range of digital areas (including
interactive, genetic, telematic and nanoart). The Media Art History Project
offers a basis for attempting an evolutionary history of the audiovisual media,
from the Laterna Magica to the Panorama, Phantasmagoria, Film, and the Virtual
Art of recent decades. This panel tries to clarify, if and how varieties of
Media Art have been splitting up during the last decades. It examines also how
far back Media Art reaches as a historical category within the history of Art,
Science and Technology.
2. Although there
has been important scholarship on intersections between art and technology,
there is no comprehensive technological history of art (as there are feminist
and Marxist histories of art, for example.) Canonical histories of art fail to
sufficiently address the inter-relatedness of developments in science,
technology, and art. What
similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities, can be mapped
onto artistic uses of technology and the role of artists in shaping technology
throughout the history of art? This
panel seeks to take account of extant literature on this history in order to
establish foundations for further research and to
gain perspective on its place with respect to larger historiographical
concerns.
II. Methodologies
This session
tries to give a critical overview of which methods art history has been using
during the past to approach media art. Papers regarding media archaeological,
anthropological, narrative and observer oriented approaches are welcome. Equally
encouraged are proposals on iconological, semiotic and cyberfeministic
methods.
III. Art as Research / Artists as
Inventors
Do
"innovations" and "inventions" in the field of art differ from those in the
field of technology and science? Do artists still contribute anything "new" to
those fields of research - and did they ever in history? Which inventions
changed the arts as well as technology and the media? These questions will be
discussed in a frame from the 19th century until today, special foci of interest
are:
- modernism and the birth of media technology 1840 - 1880
- the
utopia of merging art and technology in the 1920s and 1960s
- the crisis of
the "new" vs. digital media art innovations since the
1980s
IV. Image Science and ‘Representation’: From a Cognitive Point
of View
Although much recent scholarship in the Humanities and Social
Sciences has been "body-minded," this research has yet to grapple with a major
problem familiar to contemporary cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. How
do we reconcile a top-down, functional view of cognition with a view of human
beings as elements of a culturally shaped biological world? Current scientific
investigations into autopoiesis, emotion, symbolization, mind-body relations,
consciousness, "mental representations", visual and perceptual systems …open up
fresh ways of not only figuring the self but of approaching historical as well
as elusive electronic media --again or anew--from the deeper vantage of an
embodied and distributed brain. Papers that struggle concretely to relate
and integrate aspects of the brain basis of cognition with any number of
pattern-making media are solicited to stimulate
debate.
V. Collaborative
Practice/ Networking (history)
In a network
people are working together, they share resources and knowledge with each other
- and they compete with each other. This process has sped up enormously within a
few decades and has reached a new quality/dimension. It is the computer who had
and has a forming influence on this change – from the Mainframes of the 50s and
60s to the PCs of the 70s and the growing popularity of the Internet during the
90s of the past century. The dataflow created new economies and new forms of
human communication – and last but not least the so-called
globalization.
VI.
Pop/Mass/Society
The dividing
lines between art products and consumer products have been disappearing more and
more since the Pop Art of the 1960s. The distinction between artist and
recipient has also become blurred. Most recently, the digitalization of our
society has sped up this process enormously. In principle, more and more
artworks are no longer bound to a specific place and can be further developed
relatively freely. The cut-and-paste principle has become an essential
characteristic of contemporary culture production. The spread of access to the
computer and the internet gives more people the possibility to participate in
this production. The panel examines concrete forms, as for example computer
games, determining the cultural context and what consequences they could have
for the understanding of art in the 21st
century.
VII a. Collecting,
preserving and archiving the media arts
Collections grow
because of different influences such as art dealers, the art
market, curators
and currents in the international contemporary art scene.
What are the
conditions necessary for a wider consideration of media art
works and of new
media in these collections?
VII b.
Database/New Scientific Tools
Accessing and
browsing the immense amount of data produced by individuals, institutions, and
archives has become a key question to our information society. In which way can
new scientific tools of structuring and visualizing data provide new contexts
and enhance our understanding of semantics?
VIII.
Cross-Culture – Global Art
Issues
of cultural difference will be included throughout Refresh! However, the panels in
Cross-Culture--Global Art provide an opportunity to examine cross-cultural
influences, the global and the local.
Through these sessions we hope to construct the histories, influences and
parallels to new media art and even the definitions of what constitutes new
media from varied cultural perspectives.
For example, how what are the impacts of narrative structures from
Aboriginal and other oral cultures on the analysis and practice of new
media? How do notions of identity
shift across cultures historically, how are these embedded and transformed by
new media practice? What
philosophical perspectives can ground our understandings of new media
aesthetics? How does globalization
and the construction of global contexts such as festivals and biennials effect
local new media practices? We encourage papers from diverse cultural
perspectives and methodologies.
IX. What can the
History of New Media Learn from History of Science/Science
Studies?
As in the case of
artists working in traditional media who have engaged science and technology,
new media artists must be situated contextually in the “cultural field” (Kate
Hayles) in which they have worked or are working. Science and technology have been an
important part of that cultural field in the twentieth century, and the history
of science and science studies—along with the field of literature and
science--offer important lessons for art historians writing the history of new
media art. This session invites
papers from art historians and scholars in science-related disciplines which
explore methodological and theoretical issues as well as those that put
interdisciplinary approaches into practice in studying new media
art.
X. Rejuvenate: Film,
sound and music in media arts history
During an
earlier period of new media arts discourse, time-based media were often
considered to be "old media." While this conceit has been tempered, we still
need to consider the sophistication and provocation of film, sound and music
from the perspective of media arts history. This session invites papers, which
examine the return of old media, thick in their natural habitat of the
discourses, practices and institutions of the arts, entertainment,
science,
everyday life, wherever they existed.
Please send a 200
word proposal and a very brief curriculum vitae by
Details about
their format will be sent separately to the participants.
All
Papers will be considered for publication.
Registration information soon:
www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/
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www.MediaArtHistory.org
HONORARY
BOARD
Rudolf ARNHEIM; Frank POPPER; Jasia REICHARDT; Itsuo SAKANE, Walter
ZANINI
ADVISORY BOARD
Andreas BROECKMANN, Berlin; Paul BROWN, London; Karin BRUNS, Linz;
Annick BUREAUD, Paris; Dieter DANIELS, Leipzig; Diana DOMINGUES, Caxias do Sul;
Felice FRANKEL, Boston; Jean GAGNON, Montreal; Thomas GUNNING, Chicago; Linda D.
HENDERSON, Austin; Manrai HSU, Taipei; Erkki HUHTAMO, Los Angeles; Ángel
KALENBERG, Montevideo; Ryszard KLUSZCZYNSKI, Lodz; Machiko KUSAHARA, Tokyo;
W.J.T. MITCHELL, Chicago; Gunalan NADARAJAN, Singapore; Eduard SHANKEN, Durham;
Barbara STAFFORD, Chicago; Christiane PAUL, New York; Louise POISSANT, Montreal;
Jeffrey SHAW, Sydney; Tereza WAGNER, Paris; Peter WEIBEL, Karlsruhe; Steven
WILSON, San Francisco.
Sara DIAMOND,
Director of Research and Artistic Director of BNMI (Local
Chair)
Susan KENNARD,
Executive Producer of BNMI (Organisation)
www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/
LEONARDO
Annick BUREAUD,
Director Leonardo Pioneers and
Pathbreakers Art
History Project, Leonardo/OLATS
www.olats.org
PUBLICATIONS
COMMITTEE
Chair: Roger F
MALINA, Chair Leonardo/ISAST
www.leonardo.info
CONFERENCE
DIRECTOR & ORGANISATION
Oliver GRAU,
Director Immersive Art & Database of Virtual
Art
http://virtualart.hu-berlin.de
SUPPORTED
BY:
LEONARDO,