CALL FOR PAPERS
THE MATTER OF MIMESIS
STUDIES ON MIMESIS AND MATERIALS IN NATURE, ART AND SCIENCE
CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 17-18 December 2015
Sponsored by:
CRASSH (Centre for Research into the Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities)
NWO (The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
Organized by:
Dr Emma Spary (University of Cambridge) and Dr Marjolijn Bol
(University of Amsterdam and the Max Planck Institute for the History
of Science, Berlin)
This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together scholars from
the sciences, social sciences and humanities in order to address
material practices of mimesis. Aristotle, in one of the first
definitions of the concept, argues that mimesis, or the imitation of
nature, refers to both form and material. Thus far, scholarship has
mostly focused on the role of form in mimetic practices, while the
mimetic role of materials, despite the many disciplines in which these
are central to making and knowing, remains significantly understudied.
Materials play a fundamental role in mimetic practices, from the
earliest known examples to some of the most recent. Ancient ceramic
vessels, for instance, some nearly four millennia old, imitate the
visual appearance of other materials like metal or straw, while
medieval artisans gave wood the costly appearance of marble, or made
paper seem like gilded leather. The industrial revolution and chemical
innovation created many new opportunities for material mimesis, crowned
with the invention of plastics, which can be transformed into almost
anything imaginable. Today, computer science allows us to flip pages of
digital paper and navigate the visible world in three dimensions, while
material science has invented biomaterials that replace the cells of
our bodies, smart materials that can assume the appearance of their
surroundings, and drugs that imitate the material of neurotransmitters,
to name but a few. The role of materials in mimesis is by no means
limited to the past: the practice will continue to have an impact in
the future which cannot be foreseen.
The conference invites papers that explore the different roles played
by materials in mimetic practices. The notion of substitution raises
questions about the new techniques invented by artisans for making one
material resemble another, as well as about the politics of the Ersatz
in diet and medicine. Replication has united historians and
anthropologists in attempts to reconstruct past materials and
techniques, as well as engaging historians of science with the issue of
‘tacit knowledge’. Forgery, from banknotes to paintings, creates a
competition to establish expertise over materials and mimetic processes
between forgers and their opponents, who each have to become
increasingly expert in order either to produce, or to detect,
fraudulent objects. Nachahmung, the question of likeness and
verisimilitude, is particularly interesting in material mimetic
practices where artisans attempt to materialize the impossible, to give
marble the weight of silk and hair, or have paper take on the
appearance of a solid block of gold. Similarly interesting in this
respect is the discussion over which representations of animal and
plant materials most successfully capture ‘Nature’. Preservation is
also a form of material mimesis, not only in recreations of life and
the body after death in mummies, effigies and relics, but also as a way
of stabilising a lasting value in certain material objects, either
through technologies of preventing change or through reuse. Lastly, the
question of disguise engages with material mimesis in important ways,
from animal camouflage to smart materials that can assume the
appearance of their surroundings and debates about bio-engineering
where artificial tissues and organs are made to become one with our
bodies.
Participants from different fields are welcome, including, but not
limited to, archaeology, philosophy, art history and technical art
history, history of science, technology and medicine, materials
science, biology, anthropology and sociology.
Deadline for submissions: 15 September 2015 - Abstracts and proposals
of 300 words (max), a short biography of
100 words (max). Please reply to: [log in to unmask]
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Call for papers
The (After) Lives of Things: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Material
Culture
AAH 2016, University of Edinburgh, 7-9 April 2016
Session convenors:
Sarah Laurenson, University of Edinburgh, [log in to unmask]
Freya Gowrley, University of Edinburgh, [log in to unmask]
Material things have been used to fashion identities and form social
relationships throughout history. This panel seeks to shed light on the
intersecting histories of materiality and process in the production and
consumption of material culture. It invites papers that examine how
physical and intellectual practices such as collecting, repurposing and
remaking conveyed materially embedded messages about the subjective
experience of their owner-makers, as well as the period in which they
were undertaken more broadly. Such practices performed not only
physical but semantic changes upon these objects which, due to their
revised contexts, reciprocally enacted changes upon their possessors.
Examining how these processes allowed individuals to construct
identities, spaces, and social bonds, this panel will address issues
central to the ‘material turn’ that has characterised recent
scholarship within the humanities and, in particular, that of art
history. Papers concerning all geographical areas and time periods –
from the beginning of human history to the present day – are welcome.
Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:
• object biographies
• construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction
• adaptation and alteration
• quotation and pastiche, bricolage & photomontage
• movement: mobility, translation, and geographical transformation
• composite forms of artistic production: quilting,
shell/feather/paper-work, collaging
• affective, familial, and emotional objects
• modes of acquisition: collection, found objects, inheritance, and
gift exchange
• the relationship between mass production and personal identity
We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words. Email paper proposals to
the session convenors by 9 November 2015. Paper Proposal Guidelines are
available to download here:
http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2016/session24
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