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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: [log in to unmask]
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
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