Jan 2010)

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Art Work between Technology and Nature

International conference at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen,
21-23 January 2010

Occasioned by the exhibitions Nature Strikes Back! and Impact: Living
in the age of climate change, running in parallel to the UN climate
change conference in Copenhagen, this art historical conference will
explore the relationship between art, nature and technology. The
present climatic crisis foregrounds the observation that during the
last century human technology has come to play a crucial role in the
overall behaviour of nature, both as a disturber of ecological
balances and as a potential healer of them.

Parallel to this development, art seems to have become more closely
involved with both nature and technology, challenging on the one hand
conceptions of art contemplating nature as a distant landscape and, on
the other, art as being foreign to the social interaction and physical
dynamics of technology. These approaches often highlight art?s
critical and reflective function, and yet in art?s very interchange
with nature and technology there are certain reminiscenses from the
ancient and medieval periods in which art and technology were aspects
of a common area of cultivated products and their methods ? the Latin
ars and the Greek technè ? and in which this area was thought to
function according to principles imitating nature.

Papers are therefore invited which focus on these post-modern
convergences or present a historical perspective in which their
forerunners in the modern and pre-modern periods are exposed.
Potential questions to be addressed include: In which ways has art
been related to the two domains of nature and technology in different
historical epochs? Have they been coordinated to harmonising syntheses
or rather placed in fields of antagonism? Do they share certain
genetic principles or are they created according to different paradigms?

Send a proposal of no more than 400 words to:

Professor Jacob Wamberg kunjwhum.au.dk

Deadline for abstracts: 4 September 2009