Second Annual Graduate Conference, School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom - 17th May 2013

Keynote speaker: Jonathan Harris, Professor in Global Art and Design Studies and Director of Research for the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art and Design Media at the University of Southampton.

In the postwar period, maps have become increasingly common as an artistic medium, but this rise to prominence emerges from several distinct historical trajectories.

One important lineage is that linked to Conceptual Art and its legacy, where the map, like the diagram, has been used as a figure of social abstraction, raising questions about the space and its representation as well as art and communications technology. Elsewhere, groups such as the Situationist International and certain strands of performance art have been concerned with the production of art (or anti-art), in or as ‘real space’, something that pushes the boundaries of mapping and perhaps art practice to their limit. In such practices, maps have been an important means of producing, documenting and disseminating activities, whilst tactics of counter-mapping have been used to question representational hegemonies, even representation itself. Equally many artists have sought to contest what is at stake in mapping from a postcolonial standpoint – to redraw maps or to erase them altogether.

These are only some of the many engagements with map-making in postwar art. This conference examine specific examples of such practices, but also draw out potential common threads. In more recent years, changes in technology, for example satellite navigation and locative media, and transformations in the (geo)political landscape have significantly impacted map-making practices, and we will be investigating these developments as well.

PROGRAMME:
9.30 – Registration

10:00 – 10:10 – Introduction

10:10 – 11:15 – PANEL 1 – Psychogeographic Legacies

Berit Hummel – Mapping Dériville. Playtime, Alphaville and the Recapturing of Urban Space.

Ruth Burgon – 'Lost in this City and in this Story': Maps, Stories and the Fractured Subject on the Work of Sophie Calle and Janet Cardiff

COFFEE BREAK

11:35 – 12:45 – Panel 2 – Locative Media

Dan Frodsham – Locating 'Place' on the Maps of Mobile Social Networks: The Case of 'COMOB'

Gavin MacDonald – Bodies Moving and Being Moved: Mapping Affect in Christian Nold's Bio Mapping

LUNCH BREAK

13:45 – 15:20 – Panel 3 – Mapping Beyond the 'Western' Imaginary

Doris Bravo – Mapping South America's Interior Sea: The School of Valparaiso's Travesías

Felipe Palma – The Translation Act, or The Performative Maps of the Atacama Desert, South America

Henry Skerritt – Mapping Colonial Massacres onto the Ancestral Landscape

COFFEE BREAK

15:45 – 17:00 – Panel 4 – Time, Histories, Entropy

Hugh Govan – Specific Objects, Precarious Journeys: On Robert Smithson's Non-Site: Line of Wreckage (1968) and Mapping in Post-Minimal Art

Regina Mamou – Mapping Collected Memory in Amman, Jordan

17:00 – 18:00 – Keynote Address

Jonathan Harris - 'Mother Nature on the Run: Austerity and utopian globalisms in the visual arts in the 1970s'

For more information artandmapsessex.ac.uk or see http://artandmaps.wordpress.com

Selected conference proceedings will be published in a special issue of rebus, the department’s online journal of Art History and Theory.