[spectre] "The Matter with Media" panel at ISEA2011: Call for Expressions of Interest

[Will Schrimshaw]

[Please forward]

The Matter with Media panel at the 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2011) in Istanbul, Turkey invites expressions of interest for presentations Sept 14th-21st, 2011.

http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/isea2011/

Along with invited panelists, the selected participants will be welcomed to discuss their ideas, artworks, media and other forms of practice-infused research in response to the following ideas:

“The early human artists who tapped into this expressive reservoir for their cave paintings, body tattoos, and ritual ceremonies, far from introducing artistry into the world were simply adding one more voice to an ongoing material chorus.” – Manuel DeLanda

Our digital, networked age hides from us in plain sight the concrete, historical and affective correspondences between matter, information and perception. The practice and culture of art-and-technology make it easy to forget the material underpinnings and implications of artistic activity and production. Information systems, media and the electronic arts in particular require the support of a bewildering nexus of power and infrastructure. This fact “alerts us to the attenuated indexical trace of an objective real that haunts the apparently self-referential world of pure simulacra.” The ubiquitous temporal and spatial freedoms promised to us by cyber-theorists and reified in example by artists, are a no-show, or as Kittler emphatically put it, “There is No Software.”

Questions & topic areas:
* What frameworks for conceptualizing “the digital” best emphasize its tangible appeal and consequence, as well as its ecological and systemic repercussions?
* How do we best challenge the abstract rhetorics of cyber-theory and virtuality of later-day 20th-Century new media and interactive art discourse?
* What is the material of “raw data,” and what are its canonical or iconic forms?
* How can we work as artists with information/ signals as material and understand the interpretive and representative extrapolations necessarily being made?
* How does data differ from other materials which have a more obvious physical material forms?
* What powers have we delegated signals and data as things-in-themselves?
* Distinctions between the “natural” and “man-made” as we regard technologies as complex ecologies of matter.
* Distinctions between what is within and without our understanding, control or composition (industrial or economic complexes, ecologies).
* Historical, cultural and contemporary artistic practice relations between “technology”, “new media”, “electronic art” and “mainstream contemporary art.”
* Discourses on aesthetics as to the purpose and function of art as prescient, decorative, memetic, interrogative, challenging and defiant.
* Educational, epistemological differences in the humanities, creative arts practices, and engineering and the sciences.

Panel applicants responding to this call for expressions of interest will be select based on a 300-word abstract, submitted via email to the panel organisers by March 31st, 2011. Submission details:
* Title of your presentation
* Your first and last name
* Your email address
* Your institutional affiliation
* A 300-word (maximum) abstract responding to panel topics.
* Email all of the above as a single PDF file to: jamie at heavyside.net, tomschofieldart at gmail.com, will at willschrimshaw.net
* Optionally please attach, along with your submitted PDF (as separate attachment) one representative image, with image credits.

http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/isea2011/


(image: kuba ryniewicz)
-------------- next part --------------
Skipped content of type multipart/related