Call for Papers
REFRESH! FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Banff New Media Institute, Canada, September 28 - October 3, 2005
http://www.mediaarthistory.org
Deadline: Dec. 1st 2004

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"The technology of the modern media has produced new possibilities of
interaction... What is needed is a wider view encompassing the coming
rewards in the context of the treasures left us by the past experiences,
possessions, and insights." (Rudolf Arnheim, Summer 2000)

Recognizing the increasing significance of media art for our culture, this
Conference (Evening of Sept. 28th, Sept. 29th, 30th, October 1st) on the
Histories of Media Art will discuss for the first time the history of
media art within the interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts of the
histories of art. Leonardo/ISAST, Banff New Media Institute the Database
for Virtual Art and UNESCO DigiArts are collaborating to produce the first
international art history conference covering art and new media, art and
technology, art-science interaction, and the history of media as pertinent
to contemporary art.

Held at The Banff Centre, featuring lectures by invited and selected
speakers, the latter being chosen by an international jury from a call for
papers, the main event will be followed by a two-day summit meeting
(October 2-3, 2005) for in-depth dialogues and international project
initiation (proposals welcome).

For more information on the conference, please visit:
www.MediaArtHistory.org

Papers are invited from scholars and postgraduates in any relevant
discipline, particularly art history and new media, art and technology,
the interaction of art and science, and media history, are encouraged to
submit for the following sessions: (Please address your proposals to the
sessions with the Priority A to C)

I. MediaArtHistories: Times and Landscapes I and II

I. After photography, film, video, and the little known media art history
of the 1960s-80s, today media artists are active in a wide range of
digital areas (including interactive, genetic, telematic and nano art).
The Media Art History Project offers a basis for attempting an
evolutionary history of the audiovisual media, from the Laterna Magica to
the Panorama, Phantasmagoria, Film, and the Virtual Art of recent decades.
This panel tries to clarify, if and how varieties of Media Art have been
splitting up during the last decades. It examines also how far back Media
Art reaches as a historical category within the history of Art, Science
and Technology.

2. Although there has been important scholarship on intersections between
art and technology, there is no comprehensive technological history of art
(as there are feminist and Marxist histories of art, for example.)
Canonical histories of art fail to sufficiently address the
inter-relatedness of developments in science, technology, and art. What
similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities, can be
mapped onto artistic uses of technology and the role of artists in shaping
technology throughout the history of art? This panel seeks to take account
of extant literature on this history in order to establish foundations for
further research and to gain perspective on its place with respect to
larger historiographical concerns.

II. Methodologies
This session tries to give a critical overview of which methods art
history has been using during the past to approach media art. Papers
regarding media archaeological, anthropological, narrative and observer
oriented approaches are welcome. Equally encouraged are proposals on
iconological, semiotic and cyberfeministic methods.

III. Art as Research / Artists as Inventors
Do "innovations" and "inventions" in the field of art differ from those in
the field of technology and science? Do artists still contribute anything
"new" to those fields of research - and did they ever in history? Which
inventions changed the arts as well as technology and the media? These
questions will be discussed in a frame from the 19th century until today,
special foci of interest are:
- modernism and the birth of media technology 1840-1880
- the utopia of merging art and technology in the 1920s and 1960s
- the crisis of the "new" vs. digital media art innovations since the
1980s

IV. Image Science and 'Representation': From a Cognitive Point of View
Although much recent scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences has
been "body-minded," this research has yet to grapple with a major problem
familiar to contemporary cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. How do
we reconcile a top-down, functional view of cognition with a view of human
beings as elements of a culturally shaped biological world? Current
scientific investigations into autopoiesis, emotion, symbolization,
mind-body relations, consciousness, "mental representations", visual and
perceptual systems Sopen up fresh ways of not only figuring the self but
of approaching historical as well as elusive electronic media --again or
anew--from the deeper vantage of an embodied and distributed brain. Papers
that struggle concretely to relate and integrate aspects of the brain
basis of cognition with any number of pattern-making media are solicited
to stimulate debate.

V. Collaborative Practice/ Networking (history)
In a network people are working together, they share resources and
knowledge with each other - and they compete with each other. This process
has sped up enormously within a few decades and has reached a new
quality/dimension. It is the computer who had and has a forming influence
on this change - from the Mainframes of the 50s and 60s to the PCs of the
70s and the growing popularity of the Internet during the 90s of the past
century. The dataflow created new economies and new forms of human
communication - and last but not least the so-called globalization.

VI. Pop/Mass/Society
The dividing lines between art products and consumer products have been
disappearing more and more since the Pop Art of the 1960s. The distinction
between artist and recipient has also become blurred. Most recently, the
digitalization of our society has sped up this process enormously. In
principle, more and more artworks are no longer bound to a specific place
and can be further developed relatively freely. The cut-and-paste
principle has become an essential characteristic of contemporary culture
production. The spread of access to the computer and the internet gives
more people the possibility to participate in this production. The panel
examines concrete forms, as for example computer games, determining the
cultural context and what consequences they could have for the
understanding of art in the 21st century.

VII a. Collecting, preserving and archiving the media arts
Collections grow because of different influences such as art dealers, the
art market, curators and currents in the international contemporary art
scene. What are the conditions necessary for a wider consideration of
media art works and of new media in these collections?

VII b. Database/New Scientific Tools
Accessing and browsing the immense amount of data produced by individuals,
institutions, and archives has become a key question to our information
society. In which way can new scientific tools of structuring and
visualizing data provide new contexts and enhance our understanding of
semantics?

VIII. Cross-Culture - Global Art
Issues of cultural difference will be included throughout Refresh!
However, the panels in Cross-Culture--Global Art provide an opportunity to
examine cross-cultural influences, the global and the local. Through these
sessions we hope to construct the histories, influences and parallels to
new media art and even the definitions of what constitutes new media from
varied cultural perspectives. For example, how what are the impacts of
narrative structures from Aboriginal and other oral cultures on the
analysis and practice of new media? How do notions of identity shift
across cultures historically, how are these embedded and transformed by
new media practice? What philosophical perspectives can ground our
understandings of new media aesthetics? How does globalization and the
construction of global contexts such as festivals and biennials effect
local new media practices? We encourage papers from diverse cultural
perspectives and methodologies.

IX. What can the History of New Media Learn from History of
Science/Science Studies?
As in the case of artists working in traditional media who have engaged
science and technology, new media artists must be situated contextually in
the "cultural field" (Kate Hayles) in which they have worked or are
working. Science and technology have been an important part of that
cultural field in the twentieth century, and the history of science and
science studies-along with the field of literature and science--offer
important lessons for art historians writing the history of new media art.
This session invites papers from art historians and scholars in
science-related disciplines which explore methodological and theoretical
issues as well as those that put interdisciplinary approaches into
practice in studying new media art.

X. Rejuvenate: Film, sound and music in media arts history
During an earlier period of new media arts discourse, time-based media
were often considered to be "old media." While this conceit has been
tempered, we still need to consider the sophistication and provocation of
film, sound and music from the perspective of media arts history. This
session invites papers, which examine the return of old media, thick in
their natural habitat of the discourses, practices and institutions of the
arts, entertainment, science, everyday life, wherever they existed.

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Please send a 200 word proposal and a very brief
curriculum vitae by December 1st, 2004
via e-mail to: MediaArtHistoriesculture.hu-berlin.de.
Full papers (5000 to 7000 word long) must be
received via e-mail by July 1st., 2005.
Details about their format will be sent separately to the participants.
All Papers will be considered for publication.
Registration information soon: www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/
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www.MediaArtHistory.org

SUPPORTED BY:
LEONARDO, BANFF NMI, DATABASE OF VIRTUAL ART,
GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION, UNESCO DIGIARTS, VILLA VIGONI, INTEL

HONORARY BOARD
Rudolf ARNHEIM; Frank POPPER; Jasia REICHARDT; Itsuo SAKANE, Walter ZANINI

ADVISORY BOARD
Andreas BROECKMANN, Berlin; Paul BROWN, London;
Karin BRUNS, Linz; Annick BUREAUD, Paris; Dieter
DANIELS, Leipzig; Diana DOMINGUES, Caxias do Sul;
Felice FRANKEL, Boston; Jean GAGNON, Montreal;
Thomas GUNNING, Chicago; Linda D. HENDERSON,
Austin; Manrai HSU, Taipei; Erkki HUHTAMO, Los
Angeles; Ángel KALENBERG, Montevideo; Ryszard
KLUSZCZYNSKI, Lodz; Machiko KUSAHARA, Tokyo;
W.J.T. MITCHELL, Chicago; Gunalan NADARAJAN,
Singapore; Eduard SHANKEN, Durham; Barbara
STAFFORD, Chicago; Christiane PAUL, New York;
Louise POISSANT, Montreal; Jeffrey SHAW, Sydney;
Tereza WAGNER, Paris; Peter WEIBEL, Karlsruhe;
Steven WILSON, San Francisco.

BANFF
Sara DIAMOND, Director of Research and Artistic Director of BNMI (Local
Chair)
Susan KENNARD, Executive Producer of BNMI (Organisation)
www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/

LEONARDO
Annick BUREAUD, Director Leonardo Pioneers and
Pathbreakers Art History Project, Leonardo/OLATS
www.olats.org

PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE
Chair: Roger F MALINA, Chair Leonardo/ISAST
www.leonardo.info

CONFERENCE DIRECTOR & ORGANISATION
Oliver GRAU, Director Immersive Art & Database of Virtual Art
Humboldt University Berlin
http://virtualart.hu-berlin.de