Dear Colleagues, 
  
sorry to respond late, I have been offline for a bit. There has been some discussion about the development of Refresh!, of which I serverd as chair, over the past few days, which I can now comment upon. I think it would be best to share an email sent a few days after Refresh! 2005 to all advisors and summit participants, regarding statisics on participation of our conference. 
The content development of Refresh! was a highly collective process. It involved three producing partners, a large advisory board, 2 chairs for each session, call and review for papers, a planning meeting in 2004, keynotes, postersession and the development of application content over the time of two and a half years. Before Banff could host the conference, this was organised by the team of the Database for Virtual (DVA), through over 5000 emails from us, to support the collective process of the *emerging field*. 
Many regards and thank you for the discussion. 
Oliver 
  
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Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:39:21 +0200 
From: Oliver Grau <[log in to unmask]> 
To: 
Subject: Statistics REFRESH further development of the field 
  
  
Dear colleagues and friends, 
  
(...) I'd thought some statistics might be helpful for further deepening of the discussion: 
  
For the interests of media art we decided at the Database of Virtual Art (DVA) hosted planing meeting 2004 at Vigoni/Italy, that it is of importance to bring media art history closer to the mainstream of art history and that we cultivate a proximity to film- cultural and media studies, computer science, but also philosophy and other sciences. Refresh was not planed to create a new canon, but about the many-voiced chorus of the involved approaches. The subtitle HistorIES opened up the thinking space to include approaches from other disciplines beside 'art history' too. The idea was to bring all the partly isolated subfields together (to support MediaArtHistories). We spent a lot of discussions on that concept. During this process we Europeans had to learn, that in northern America strong concerns exist and even prejudice against  the way art history is taught in the US, a perception we do not have anymore to that extent in art history programmes in central Europe. 
  
After nomination and acceptance of the chairs, coordinated call for papers, review by the program committee and selection of speakers by the chairs * organized and funded by the Database of Virtual Art - the conference brought together colleagues from the following fields: 
  
  
INVITED SPEAKERS (based on self description from bios) 
  
HISTORIES 
Art History   =  20; Media Science   = 17; History of Science =  7 
History of Ideas   =  1; History of Technology  =  1 
  
ARTISTS/CURATORS 
Artists/Research =  25; Curators   = 10 
  
SOCIAL SCIENCES 
Communication/Semiotics = 6; Aesthetics/Philosophy  = 5 
Social History   = 2; Political Science   = 2; Woman Studies   = 2 
Theological Studies  = 1 
  
OTHER CULTURAL STUDIES 
Film Studies   = 3; Literature Studies  = 3; Sound Studies   = 3 
Theatre Studies   = 2; Performance Studies  = 1; Architecture Studies  = 1 
  
Computer Science  = 2; Astronomy 1 
  
We were not able to invite all the new scholars we would have liked or all the *big names* for the keynotes we wanted and waive all fees due to limited funding from the US, but we still could organize this first-rate first conference of the field and this will grow in the future, towards Re___2 and Re___3 .   (...) 
  
Coming goals are: 
  
+ Based on our conversations in Banff, the DVA proposed an integration of media art archives and databases into a meta-SEARCH-database. The long-term goal is cross archiving of Media Art, its various documentation strategies and upcoming/unknown needs found to be relevant in the field. The short term goal is to create a single interFACE which acts like an umbrella for all participating databases, so that on-line users can more easily find information in currently internationally isolated  specialized sources.   
The meta-SEARCH tool will be communally developed by participants in the interachive mailinglist, will offer communal participation and will be communally advertised to the public. The evolving structure of Refresh and the Media Art History community will act as the base of these communal activities. 
  
+ The original conference web site www.mediaarthistory.org, supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, can develop into a visible and accessible platform and forum for our discussions and for important materials for our field. Beside the online publications of the papers or abstracts, it will archive the video documentation of our conference and other materials. (...) 
  
With these scholarly tools, we hope to serve our common interests and look forward to your participation and critique. 
  
best, 
  
Oliver