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Art, Media and Remediation
Session Chair: Dr. Andrea Korda, University of Alberta, Augustana Faculty

It is a commonplace that we are constantly bombarded with new media in today's culture, with each new technology professing its greater immediacy and superiority over what has come before. Photography surpasses painting, while film supersedes photography, television outdoes film, and the Internet unseats television.

Media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin explain how such claims for the superiority of new media are made through the process of "remediation," where a new medium borrows from an older medium with the purpose of calling attention to the ways it is new and improved. Yet remediation can work in both directions: sometimes an older, traditional medium references new media in order to assert its own supremacy and distinctiveness. Once I began thinking about remediation, it seemed as though much of the history of art could be written as a series of remediations, as artists responded to new technologies and attempted to figure out what art could do that other (usually mainstream) media did not.

For this session, I invite papers from artists and art historians that consider works of art, both historical and contemporary, as instances of remediation. What are the various ways that artists remediate both new and old media, showing that art can do something different, and possibly even better?


Proposals must include: name and email address of the applicant; the applicant's institutional affiliation and rank; the paper title; an abstract (300 words maximum); and a brief bio (150 words maximum). Please submit materials to kordaualberta.ca by July 20, 2015.

Proposals may be submitted by current members or non-members of UAAC. Non-members must become members of UAAC by October 1, 2015 in order to participate. Please visit http://www.uaac-aauc.com/en for further details.