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CALL FOR PAPERS (The deadline for new submissions
has been closed!)
REFRESH! FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Banff New Media Institute, Canada
Conference: September 28 - October 1st, 2005
Summit: October 2nd - 3rd (Summit is by Invitation Only)
http://www.mediaarthistory.org - Deadline was: Dec. 1st 2004
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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:
www.MediaArtHistory.org
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. MediaArtHistories:
Times and Landscapes I and II
1.
(Chair:
Oliver Grau, co: Gunalan Nadarajan)
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.
(Chair Edward Shanken, co: Charlie Gere)
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
(Chair: t. b. a.)
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 (Chair: Dieter Daniels)
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 (Chair:
Barbara Stafford)
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) (Chair: Ryszard Kluszczynski, co: Diana
Domingues)
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
(Chair Machiko Kusahara, co: Andreas Lange)
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 (Chair:
Jean Gagnon)
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 (Chair: Rudolf Frieling, co: Oliver
Grau)
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 (Chair: Sara Diamond, Co: Manray Hsu)
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?
(Chair: Linda Henderson)
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 (Chair Tom Gunning,
Co: Douglas Kahn)
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.
XI. High
Art/Low Culture – the future of media art sciences? (Chair:
Karin Bruns)
The panel aims to bring together the methodological fields of media studies
and media art history. Rather than limiting their focus to canonical works
of art new studies in media art production blend methods and issues from
art history and media sciences as well as from communication studies,
sociology, techno sciences, art history, cultural and postcolonial studies.
To enhance discussions papers of the following topics are invited: methods,
history and principles of western media sciences; concepts of techno-cultural
media sciences; visual studies, game culture studies and media art; everyday
digital culture.
Please send
a 200 word proposal and a very brief curriculum vitae by December 1st,
2004 via e-mail to MediaArtHistories@culture.hu-berlin.de (This
deadline has been closed!). Full papers (3000 to 4000 word long)
must be received via e-mail by July 1st., 2005.
Details about their format will be sent separately to the participants.
All Papers will be considered for publication.
Registration information (soon): http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/events/refresh/
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www.MediaArtHistory.org
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