[1] Ekphrasis and Artificial Intelligence: Text-to-Image Generation in Theory and Practice

From: Amanda Wasielewski, amanda.wasielewskiabm.uu.se
Date: Jul 24, 2023
Deadline: Aug 31, 2023

Session will present: In-Person

AI text-to-image generation tools, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, were introduced to the public in 2022 with great fanfare. This initial burst of excitement has subsequently been tempered by growing concerns regarding copyright, privacy, and the threat to creative industries they may pose. These multimodal artificial intelligence platforms require little to no specialized technical knowledge or equipment to use, which means that just about anyone can quickly generate a diverse array of images from text-based descriptions. Combining large language and diffusion models, these generators are highly flexible and, some have claimed, highly creative. The text-based descriptions used to create images on such platforms could be considered ekphrasis, but instead of describing an artwork or object that already exists, they invite users to describe images into existence. They actually create images by means of description. This session seeks contributions that both theorize the paradigm of image creation these new tools represent and describe their uses in artistic practice or academic study. What is at stake for art history and art practitioners in using multimodal text and image AI? Possible topics may include theory of the image, reflections on text and image study, history and theory of photography, issues of appropriation and authenticity, the use of such tools or the images created by them in cultural heritage or digital humanities research, applications in architecture and design, and reflection on art practice or discussion of artists’ work using text-to-image AI.

Field(s) of Study:
Media: Digital Media (history and studio)
Theory / Practice: Creativity
Theory / Practice: Digital Scholarship/History
Theory / Practice: Theory
Artificial Intelligence

Chair: Amanda Wasielewski, Uppsala Universitet
Submit via CAA website: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session12648.html

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[2] HNA-sponsored Session at CAA: Center and Periphery?: Mapping a Future for Research in Netherlandish Art

From: Ashley West
Date: Jul 24, 2023
Deadline: Aug 15, 2023

Stephanie Dickey and Suzanne van de Meerendonk, Queen's University
stephanie.dickeyqueensu.ca / s.vandemeerendonkqueensu.ca

Center and Periphery?: Mapping a Future for Research in Netherlandish Art

In recent years, academic scholarship on Netherlandish art has increasingly embraced decolonial and intersectional approaches to the study of visual culture. Meanwhile, museums continue to mount exhibitions and sponsor technical research focused around well-known artists such as Pieter Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Easel painting remains the crowd-pleasing focal point of most large-scale art exhibitions even as new research illuminates alternative media ranging from glass engraving to textiles. Efforts to reinscribe those previously excluded from the 'canon', such as women artists, offer promise but must reckon with the problematics of canonicity itself. This session seeks papers that model a productive synthesis or dialogue between these trends, mapping pathways for future inquiry that reconcile divergent goals and prepare today's emerging scholars for careers both within and beyond academe. Papers might situate works by familiar artists in unfamiliar terrain, for instance by examining them in relation to global trade, material culture, or through an intersectional lens. Others may offer critiques of the 'center and periphery' dichotomy by foregrounding historically marginalized topics and makers against the background of canonical art production. Analyses of innovative museum projects (recent and future) are also welcome, as is a frank assessment of the continuing value of connoisseurship as practice and methodology. Proposals from early-stage scholars are especially welcome.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and 2-page abbreviated CV to Stephanie Dickey and Suzanne van de Meerendonk (emails listed above) by August 15, 2023, for consideration. Contributors must be members in good standing of HNA and CAA.

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[3] Walls, Blockades, and Barricades: Art at the Margins of the New Enclosures
From: Leah Modigliani and Noah Randolph
Date: Jul 24, 2023
Registration deadline: Aug 21, 2023

Session will present IN PERSON

We are living in an era of walls. Not only physical walls, which have exponentially increased since the ballyhooed fall of the Berlin Wall, but boundaries made of identities, economies, illnesses, and politics that seem impenetrable. By 2021, 72 border walls covered 31,000 kilometers of the Earth’s surface, 56 of them built after 9/11 and 32 after the Arab Spring. The rigidity of the border wall appears as an ironic indicator of the fear of the loss of state sovereignty, performing what border theorists call a theatrical presence to assuage the anxieties of an internal population.

It’s also striking that the image of a wall, barricade or blockade is formally, but not actually, at odds with Capitalism’s reorganization of space over the last four decades. The latter is consistently described by a wide range of scholars as deterritorialization; a process by which surplus labor and capital is deployed to new regional locations to accumulate. This panel considers how artists work in, around, and against political, geo-economic and environmental barriers to question these social relations. What are the solutions and provocations that artists use to confront and unsettle spaces of control? What new imaginaries and speculative futures do such artworks engender?

Topics may include (but are not limited to) case studies of artworks that resist or redeploy space as political tactic; temporalities of walls; intersections between art and critical geographies and urban studies; art’s ideological marking of territory as monument or gentrification; connections between art, activism and time-based media or performance.

Follow this link to submit an abstract: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session12666.html

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[4] How Artists Interact with the Market (TIAMSA Business Meeting, 112th CAA Annual Conference)

From: Joshua Eversfield Jenkins
Date: Jul 25, 2023
Deadline: Aug 30, 2023

Chair: Joshua Eversfield Jenkins, PhD Candidate, Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh.

Artists are often viewed as being merely at the whim of the market in which they work. This assumption, however, is not entirely true. In fact, artists have much more agency than is often supposed. Scholars have noted historic examples of artists reacting to the market in several ways, whether it be the specialization of painting specific subject matter during the Dutch Golden Age in order to maximize efficiency and profits, the changes in style and topics John Everett Millais incorporated into his work so that he could attract a wider client base, or as shown in the work of Sophie Cras in The Artist as Economist, how artists of the 1960s used economic mechanisms themselves in the creation of art. There is indeed a long and rich history of artists adapting to the market that surrounds them.

​However, there remains room for further research and a greater understanding in regards to how artists interact with the market. This session, How Artists Interact with the Market, is an opportunity to examine the historic and contemporary relationship between artists and economics. Submissions are welcome from scholars of any time period and geographical location who are interested in exploring questions concerning artistic creativity and market forces. The expectation for this analysis is to gain an increased understanding of the market generally, as well as how artists play a role in said markets, specifically.

​The session will be one-hour long and feature two, fifteen-minute presentations and will take place during TIAMSA’s business meeting at the 112th CAA Annual Conference. You do not need to be a member of CAA or register for the conference in order to present or follow this session. Likewise, this event will be live-streamed and recorded.

Anyone interested in contributing to the panel should submit an abstract of, at most, 250 words and a CV of 1-2 pages by August 30th. Additionally, please provide the title of your proposed presentation in the subject line. Potential presenters will be notified if their submissions have been accepted by September 18th. Please send submission proposals and questions to joshuaeversfield.jenkinsgmail.com.

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[5] Fractures Mirror: Between Self and State in Global Women's Video Art

From: Helena Shaskevich, hshaskegmail.com
Date: Jul 25, 2023
Deadline: Aug 31, 2023

Session will present: In-Person

In her seminal 1976 essay, art historian Rosalind Krauss defined video’s condition as a psychological state of narcissism, a continual feedback loop which trapped the artist between camera and monitor. Favoring a formalist concern for medium specificity, Krauss’s characterization of the burgeoning technology disregards not only the volatile social conditions which marked video’s entrance into the market during the 1970s, but also its almost instantaneous use by women artists for political critique. This panel will bring together a series of essays which address the numerous ways in which women artists from the 1970s to the present have subverted and re-channeled the “mirroring” effect of video and audio technology to address political issues across geographic boundaries in a global context.
Potential topics include:

- How have women artists employed an aesthetics of reproducibility, indexicality and disruption to challenge global media’s simultaneous privatization and use by the state for surveillance?
- How did artists' projects address both the fantasy and fiction of a “borderless” global media network popularized by theorists like Marshall McLuhan and artists like Nam June Paik?
- How do these artists address issues of intersectionality, complicating a Western model of feminist politics and accommodating diverse engagements with the state?
- How have these artists employed techniques of performing for the camera to destabilize rigid norms of gender identity and undermine sexual objectification?

Field(s) of Study:
Media: Video (history and studio)
Media: Time-Based Media
Topics: World
Topics: Feminisms
Topics: Gender and Sexualities

Please send submission proposals and questions to hshaskegmail.com

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[6] Acts of Care. Affiliate session of the Women's Caucus for Art

From: Rachel Epp Buller
Date: Jul 25, 2023
Deadline: Aug 31, 2023

Panel chair: Rachel Epp Buller

Since 2020, US news outlets have regularly reported on increased levels of loneliness, isolation, and anxiety among many populations. The authors of the recent Care Manifesto argued that we live in a world in which “carelessness reigns,” and that we must conceive of care as broadly as possible if we hope to change our own behaviors or our institutions. And yet this crisis of connection and lack of caring did not originate with the COVID-19 pandemic. Artists, curators, and cultural workers have addressed this crisis, directly and indirectly, for decades, exploring ways that artistic projects can facilitate connection or speak to relational care through participatory interactions, immersive installations, or performative gestures. Already in 1992, Suzi Gablik coined the term “connective aesthetics,” anticipating a rise in contemporary art that would invoke interaction, listening, and reciprocity. This panel seeks presentations by artists and art historians featuring artistic projects that address, enact, or facilitate care and connection. Specific topics might include art as a reparative gesture, with human and more-than-human relations; participatory projects in carceral and congregate living settings; intergenerational collaborations; curatorial outreach to marginalized communities; artistic explorations of, or arts-based support groups for, illness, grief, and loss; art that celebrates and builds community; explorations of how a specific artistic medium or method facilitates relationality; artistic invitations to engage with ecological kin; or speculative inquiries that propose connections to, or caring relations in, possible futures.

Please send submission proposals and questions to rachelddtr.net

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[7] Sparkle, Sparkle, Glitter, Gleam, Glow: Reflective/Refractive Optical Mediums and Effects in Art

From: Elizabeth Howie, ehowiecoastal.edu
Date: Jul 25, 2023
Deadline: Aug 31, 2023

Session will present: In-Person

Glitter and luminous effects can fuel awe-inspiring devotion and promote other-worldly sensations, or in other circumstances may reflect the wealth, opulence, and social hierarchies of the terrestrial world. From Neolithic stone monuments embedded with quartz to reflect moonlight, to Fra Angelico’s San Marco angel’s wings shimmering with silica mixed into the plaster, to Mickalene Thomas’s paintings glittering with rhinestones, art across time and cultures has sparkled and gleamed. Human attraction to glossiness may have evolved from the necessity of locating water. Materials that reflect light may evoke protection from darkness, both literal and figurative. When used in art, the meanings of sparkles and glitter become unstable and paradoxical. Twinkly effects may convey value, disguise cheapness, or pronounce worthlessness (in the case of kitsch, for example). Sparkly trinkets have been implicated in colonial exploitation. Glittering embellishment has signified gender in a range of ways. A glittery appearance may convey brokenness (fractured glass) or refinement (a cut gem). What role do sparkly effects play in situations of devotion or ritual? How do they relate to experiences of wonder or the spectacular? How do human-made sparkles (glitter) compare to natural ones (mica, gemstones, insect wings, water)? Can the effect of glitter be captured in reproduction, or does it have to be experienced in person to be effective? This panel seeks papers that explore sparkles and glitter from a range of mediums and purposes throughout the history of art making. Papers may focus on a single artist or period, or a more theoretical overview.

Please send submission proposals and questions to ehowiecoastal.edu

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[8] Art Collections of Academies of Sciences

From: Viktor Oliver Lorincz
Date: Jul 27, 2023
Deadline: Aug 31, 2023

While collections of academies of arts are rather well studied, less consciously, academies of sciences established art collections as well comprising portraits of the founders and members, emblems, allegories, collections bequeathed by former members, and also buildings with interior and exterior decoration. Some scientific collections may have artistic value as well. Sometimes belonging to the library of the academy, or to another organizational unit, these collections are less institutionalized and less studied. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences will celebrate its bicentenary in 2025 but the Art Collection of the Academy was founded only 30 years ago. Even if the Budapest headquarter inaugurated in 1865 already came with a huge exhibition area by Friedrich August Stüler, who gained experience on museum buildings (Alte Nationalgalerie and Neues Museum in Berlin, and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm). Shortly after the foundation of the Academy, Friedrich von Amerling painted the portrait of the founder, and Johann Nepomuk Ender finished the emblem or allegory of the Academy itself. On the occasion of the anniversaries, this panel seeks contributions on similar art collections of academies of sciences, including portrait galleries, emblems and other symbols, representations of the academies, internal and external decoration of the buildings including e.g. the allegories of sciences. Recently, scientific objects, instruments and collections with aesthetic or historical value also have been added to our collection, and we also welcome submissions dealing with similar special cases.

Please submit the title, abstract (250 words or less), CV (2 pages or less) by using the ‘Submit an Abstract to this Session’ button at the session’s webpage::
https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session13174.html

CAA individual membership only needed in case of acceptance, for travel grant opportunities, please check https://collegeart.org/programs/support-grants

For further information please do not hesitate to contact us.

Contact Information:
lorincz.viktortitkarsag.mta.hu