Call for Papers

Historiographies of New Media

The Chicago Art Journal, the annual publication of the University of Chicago

Department of Art History, is seeking submissions of original work by
graduate students and faculty for its 2011-2012 edition. This year’s
issue asks how new media have affected not only the production of art,
but also the production of knowledge about art. What is at stake in
approaching art history through the concept of new media?

The term ‘new media’ has been applied to a range of formats (from
photography to video to the internet) that have revolutionized the modes
of transmission and reproduction of ‘old’ media of art at particular
historical moments. Although the concept of new media seems to promise a
mass media address, artists have often emphasized the limits of
circulation—for instance, in closed circuit television, or zines that
made use of Xerox processes and yet were distributed to small networks
through the mail. Such a dialectical relation escapes media theory’s
emphasis on mass distribution, and points instead toward misalignments
and points of friction between the imaginative and material aspects of
new media. Furthermore, from the double slide lecture to the publication
of photographs in books, and from the use of facsimiles in the classroom
to broadcasts of ‘art on television,’ the formation and performance of
the art historical discipline has itself been contingent upon pivotal
introductions of reproductive media. In turning our attention to new
media, we consider art history’s rhetorics of description and display.

The importance of thinking through the art historical repercussions of
new media has become paramount. Just as recent scholarship has addressed
the nuances of ‘pre-modern’ and modern notions of mediality (including
forms of mechanical reproducibility and audiovisual displays emergent in
the middle ages), so might we aim to reframe more contemporary art
historical categories of ‘lateness’ (such as Rosalind Krauss's
'post-medium condition'). Here we propose examining notions of new media
within a long durée. How do such temporal categories foreground
technologies that are positioned as obsolete? As Peter Weibel has
proposed, “the intrinsic success of the new media resides less in the
fact that they have developed new forms and possibilities of art than in
the fact that they have enabled us to establish new approaches to the
old media of art—and above all, have kept the latter alive by forcing
them to undergo a process of radical transformation.” What conditions of
possibility are embedded (or not) in the positioning of art as new
media? How might we emphasize the aesthetic and pedagogical aspects of
new media over notions that emerged out of communications theory, such
as interactivity? We are especially interested in papers that address
new media art histories that diverge from the well-known chronologies of
Euro-American technological developments.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

-performance and circulation of art history through facsimiles, photographs,

slide projections, radio, and television

-responses and counter-responses to new media technologies within art
criticism, critical theory, and film theory

-legacies of Friedrich Kittler and Miriam Hansen for theorizing new media

-analog and digital in art and art history

-historical modes of mechanical reproduction, imprinted coins,
technologies of the book, seals, etc.

-ekphrasis

-transfers and transformations among media, media as reference for other
media

- in what way are new media performative and public?

-materiality of new media, processes of materials

-new media and abstraction, issues of movement and circulation

-wider implications of artists’ practices in Xerox, zines, artists’
books, flip books, holograms, etc.

-relationship between art transmitted through media and art as media

-aesthetics of television in the context of capitalism and communism

-new media’s relevance for reframing art historical cycles and
geographies of innovation

-challenges to medium specificity, from medium unspecificity to
post-medium condition

-art and technology movements, including the role of dance and ‘new music’

-computerized models of art, computational ways of thinking

-collectivity and coalitions, notions of ‘social media’

-photography as new media

-historiographies of ‘video art,’ including the role of projection and
the long durée of optical media

-queer aesthetics and new media

-painting after the advent of network theory

-theories of text as visual image and text as mediation

Submissions:

* Full papers must follow The Chicago Manual of Style, and should not
exceed 4000 words. Each submission should include an abstract of
approximately

500 words. If you would like to submit an abstract without a full paper,
please contact the editors in advance. Both Word documents and PDFs are
welcome.

* All contributors should include their name, address, telephone number,
and email address. Authors are responsible for securing image
reproduction rights and any associated fees.

Please send submissions to the graduate student editors Solveig Nelson
and Stephanie Su at UChicagoArtJournal@gmail.com
<mailto:UChicagoArtJournal@gmail.com> by November 28, 2011.