Organised by:
Joris van Gastel, Giovanna Targia and Tristan Weddigen.

Attendance:
Free without registration. The event will be streamed through the Vimeo chanel of the Bibliotheca Hertziana: https://vimeo.com/event/3732926

Description:
As Marshall McLuhan argued in his seminal Understanding Media, the “hybridizing or compounding” of media “offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties.” This workshop seeks to explore sculpture’s intermedial entanglements and asks what these may reveal about the medium of sculpture. In doing so, it looks at how changing media ecologies have shaped the ways in which the fluid category of sculpture has been understood as well as how different media practices have impacted the way sculpture is conceived, produced, presented, and displayed. This entails confronting both historiographical and theoretical perspectives as well as contemporary artistic and curatorial practices. Heinrich Wölfflin’s oft-cited essays on how one should photograph sculpture can be read as a first attempt to negotiate sculpture’s status in light of a “new” medium, an issue that has gained renewed significance in what has been called the “(post-)digital age”. Indeed, digital technologies of production and reproduction have further complicated the ways in which sculpture’s media entanglements may be conceptualized, both in terms of its “translation” in graphic, lens- or screen-based media but also with regard to more sculptural modes of reproduction. Dealing with such concerns, the workshop will address sculpture’s intermedial situation from a variety of perspectives, drawing attention to the visual strategies adherent to reproduction, the display of sculpture, embodiment and conceptions of space, materiality as well as aesthetical and ethical questions.

Programme:

09:00–09:30 Welcome / Introduction

Session 1 – Chair: Giovanna Targia

09:30–10:20 Stefanie Klamm (FU Berlin)
Casts – Drawings – Photographs: Entangled Media Histories of Sculpture in Archaeology

10:20–11:10 Patrizia Di Bello (Birbeck, University of London)
Sculpture, Photography, Body: A Long History of Intermedial Entanglements

11:10–11:40 Coffee Break

11:40–12:30 Joris van Gastel (University of Zurich)
The Eye and the Lens: Towards a Media History of the Perception of Sculpture

12:30–13:20 Megan Luke (University of Tübingen)
“Raumscheu” and the Sculptural Replica

13:20–14:20 Lunch Break

Session 2 – Chair: Tristan Weddigen

14:20–15:10 Ursula Ströbele (ZI Munich)
Elasticity in Twentieth-Century Sculpture: Que(e)r(y)ing the Canon

15:10–16:00 Sofia Pirandello (University of Milan)
Untouchables: What is it Like to Be an Augmented Reality Sculpture

16:00–16:30 Coffee Break

16:30–17:20 Jens Schröter (University of Bonn)
Holography and Sculpture

17:20–18:00 Concluding discussion