PRO&CONTRA INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF MEDIA CULTURE
16-19 OCTOBER 2013

Venue — CENTRAL EXHIBITION HALL "MANEGE", MOSCOW
ORGANIZERS — "MANEGE" AND MEDIAARTLAB
WITH SUPPORT OF MIKHAIL PROKHOROV FOUNDATION, PROHELVECIA, THE CERVANTES INSTITUTE

CURATORS: OLGA SHISHKO, ANDREY SHCHERBENOK

VISUAL SPLITS: NEW MEDIA MATTERS

For over 10 years of its existence Pro&Contra International Symposium of Media Culture aims to discover connections between art, science, politics, economics, technologies, design and architecture. We also strive to present the most interesting works on the boundary of contemporary art and social practices, science, digital art and design, performance and software engineering, animation and media architecture.

Each year we select different topics, projects, artistic strategies and methods to be analyzed in various formats, including theoretical discussions, projects presentations, contests, screenings of festival programs, premieres, etc.

This year Pro&Contra will be focused on the theoretical discussion of new media art and new visuality as a whole. We are primarily interested in the meaning of their newness: what is the relationship between the new visuality of media art and classical visual space? What is the principle difference between new media art and avant-garde experiments? What is the effect of new media on our notion of visible evidence and how they affect our everyday perceptions?

Four multidisciplinary panels will constitute the core of the symposium:

-- Panel 1 Visual Space in Contemporary Media Art: Is Traditional Art Still Relevant? will ask if the experience of traditional media is a prerequisite for the appreciation of new media art forms. If avant-garde presupposed familiarity with classical art, is this also the case for contemporary media art, or is its created visual space 'self-sufficient' and comprehensible without a reference to traditional spatial imagination?

-- Panel 2 Avant-Garde and New Media: What Didn't Dziga Vertov Know? will explore if there is something about new media that avant-garde did not practice or at least presage. If contemporary technology made a lot of avant-garde dreams possible, would an avant-garde artist having miraculously obtained these technologies be transformed into a contemporary media artist, or would s/he still be missing something very important?

-- Panel 3 Imitations of Life: What Is Visual Evidence Beyond Indexicality? will analyze the consequences of blurring indexicality of photo and cinema visual images under the influence of digital technologies. If the evidentiary status of documentary image is no longer supported by the immediate indexical link with the real object, how can we speak of a visual document?

-- Panel 4 The Gallery and the Metro: How Does New Media Art Change Everyday Perceptions? will consider how new media art with its split screens, multiple points of view and dissolution of fixed identities influence our perception outside the gallery. Are multimedia installations indeed harbingers of a new kind of perception that has a potential to become dominant in everyday world?

Confirmed symposium participants include:

Oliver Grau (Germany, Austria) is art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance, Professor of Image Science and Head of the Department for Image Science at the Danube University Krems (Austria);

Lev Manovich (USA) is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." Manovich is a Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at CUNY and California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2);

Sabine Himmelsbach (Germany, Switzerland) is art historian and media theoretician, artistic director of the House of Electronic Arts Basel (Switzerland);

Jose Luis de Vicente (Spain) is researcher, curator, writer working around the edges of New Media Arts, Digital creativity, and innovation in Design and Culture, director of Visualizar Program for Data Culture at Medialab Prado, Madrid, program curator of Future Everything Festival, Manchester.

Andrey Shcherbenok (Russia) is a professor of practice in the Education Development Center at Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO, an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University and an honorary fellow at the University of Sheffield.

Alexandra Dementieva (Russia, Belgium) is media artist and theoretician, her main interests focus on social psychology and perception and their application in multimedia interactive installations;

Olga Shishko (Russia) is curator, director of MediaArtLab Center for art and cultureАлександра

Dmitry Bulatov (Russia) is an artist, researcher, art theorist, author of many articles on art and new technologies, Senior curator at the Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts and the leading expert at the Innovation Park of the Baltic Federal University (Kaliningrad, Russia).

If you are interested in taking a part in the symposium, please, send topics and abstracts (5-10 sentences) through our website at http://procontra.mediaartlab.ru/anketa/?lang=en by September 15. Plan about 20 minutes for the presentation and 10 minutes for Q&A.

http://procontra.mediaartlab.ru

Accreditation and additional info:

Olga Lukyanova, [log in to unmask],

+7 905 506 60 53