"Encountering the Interface" History of Art Graduate Student Conference at The Ohio State Univeristy

The History of Art Graduate Student Association at The Ohio State University is pleased to announce the theme for its upcoming biennial graduate student conference, "Encountering the Interface."

Conference Dates: March 25th and 26th, 2016 in Columbus, Ohio
Abstract Submission Deadline: December 15, 2015

Keynote Speaker: Kate Mondloch (University of Oregon)

Scholars understand the interface as any division or conjunction of two or more effects, entities, or spaces. Artists from all periods have engaged critically with such encounters between individuals and objects via windows, thresholds, mirrors, doors, frames, screens, etc. Though interfaces often impact the viewing experience, we aren’t always conscious of their presence. In later periods the interface becomes perhaps most integrated with daily life through new media, such as electronic technology. This graduate student conference seeks to demonstrate the interface’s essential role in shaping the object’s meaning, function, or reception. As such, the conference interrogates the interface and the various ways it facilitates, mediates, or disrupts the viewer’s engagement with an object or transmission of information. We welcome proposals that engage with this theme across broad-ranging media and time periods.

How is the viewer's experience of an object mediated through its materiality? How can objects facilitate the transition from one realm to another (ontological/experiential space; interior/exterior; material/metaphysical)? How does the interface contradict or exemplify the concept of the parergon? In what ways can the body or skin serve as a mediator for expression? Under what circumstances can the interface be transgressed physically, spiritually, or temporally? What are the consequences of such a transgression? What are new theoretical or methodological ways of considering the interface?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Frames and framing devices
- Screens, internet, film, other forms of technology
- Rituals, icons, thresholds, liminality
- The body, skin, clothing
- Masks, curtains, veils
- Sites of encounter, mediation, puncture, breakdown
- Facades and surfaces
- The canvas/materiality as threshold
- Trompe l'oeil and its success or undoing

Graduate students at any stage of study, working in the field of art history and related disciplines, are invited to submit an abstract (300 word maximum) for a 20-minute paper, along with a current C.V. by December 15, 2015. Please include the title of the presentation, as well as your level of graduate study in your submission. Selected speakers will be notified by January 15, 2016. Materials should be sent to interface.osugmail.com.