[spectre] CfP: REFRESH! conference on Media Art History

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:09:14 +0200
From: Oliver Grau <oliver.grau at culture.hu-berlin.de>


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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