[rohrpost] CALL: REFRESH! CONF. ON THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART

[Oliver Grau]

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CALL FOR PAPERS
REFRESH!    FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Banff New Media Institute, Canada, September 28 - October 3, 2005
http://www.mediaarthistory.org		Deadline: 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
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 nano art). 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 Šopen 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.

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Please send a 200 word proposal and a very brief 
curriculum vitae by December 1st, 2004
via e-mail to: MediaArtHistories at culture.hu-berlin.de.
Full papers (5000 to 7000 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: www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/
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www.MediaArtHistory.org


SUPPORTED BY: 
LEONARDO, BANFF NMI, DATABASE OF VIRTUAL ART,
GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION, UNESCO DIGIARTS, VILLA VIGONI, INTEL


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.

BANFF
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
Humboldt University Berlin
http://virtualart.hu-berlin.de