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Splendid Isolation: Urban and Rural Flows and Counterflows in Electronic Music and Related Media

February 10-12. 2005

Berlin, Germany

Held in conjunction with club transmediale.05 [BASICS]

 The relationship between communication technologies and the city has been a long and complicated one, where the density of communicative activity has often been taken as defining characteristic of urban life.  By contrast, rural areas have been idealized and marked by the relative absence of these technologies, a perception which tends to obscure the social and spatial consequences of communication technologies in rural areas.  Out of this dichotomous set of associations has emerged a constellation of forces, ideas, images and experiences which have defined both the city and rural zones in unique and singular ways.

The history of art and music bears many traces of this productive tension, in which being immersed in city life and rural hermitage act as polar opposites.  Popular music has been identified with contrapuntal movements that fluctuate between the celebration and derogation of both the rural and the urban. Within this interplay, various technologies, in particular electronic communication, have provided the principle forms of mediation between urban and rural areas, bridging and binding people and places in multiple ways and creating new hybrid territories situated within a shared mediasphere.  In this context, the challenges of cultural production in and between rural and urban regions continue to be inflected by the specific demands of electronic/digital production, distribution and consumption.

This conference intends to address topics relating to the many debates and discourses produced by the intersection of cultural production, electronic arts/media, and social relations in urban and rural settings. We encourage artists, practitioners, journalists, writers and academics to participate in what promises to be provocative conference.  In keeping with the overall themes of transmediale and club transmediale [BASICS], which investigate the aesthetic and ethical foundations of a hyper-potential culture, papers should address, but need not be restricted to, the following frameworks:
 
* (Exo/Endo)Polis: electronic music, urban/ruraldynamics, and cultural politics 
* Refashioning Networks: circuits, nodes,communities, scenes and subcultures and extended milieu
* Mediations: the rural/urban digital nexus,imagining/ representing nature in the city/the city in nature; electronicmusic and the experience of nature
* Counterflows: fluctuating movements betweenurban and rural music subcultures 
* The Best of Both worlds: bridging theurban/rural divide
* Splendid Isolation: productivity betweenseclusion, media networking and boredom; sound cultures beyond the majormetropoles
* Perforating the Mainstream: marketing themargin
* Opposing Urbanity: f(r)actions of ruralsubcultures in the metropolis
* The City and Its Other: critiques from thecentre and periphery, speaking from and to rural and urban perspectives
 
Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and are due by November 15, 2004.  Panel proposals are also welcome.

Please submit them to: <[log in to unmask]>

Papers should be kept to 20 minutes, including audio and visual clips. Please notify us at to what audiovisual equipment you will need.

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Dr. Geoff Stahl
Institut für Europäische Ethnologie
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Schiffbauerdamm 19
D-10117  Berlin
Germany
Office Phone: +49 (30) 2093-3716
Fax: +49 (30) 2093-3726
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