webstreaming of REFRESH!
These sessions represent the emergence of a new field…
Webstreaming
Refresh! the 1st International Conference on the
Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology
” Recognizing the increasing significance of media art for our culture, this Conference 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. Banff New Media Institute, the Database for Virtual Art and Leonardo/ISAST 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. ”
www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/
http://virtualart.hu-berlin.de
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/
Venue:
September 29 – October 1, Banff New Media Institute, Canada
Conference program with streaming times www.MediaArtHistory.org
Viewing:
Since we have only a few places left to attend the conference in Banff we are webstreaming live all keynotes, sessions and discussions from the site. Viewing the sessions in groups at Universities, Libraries, and Art Centers is encouraged, in order to facilitate local dialogue. Webstreaming is available in Quicktime and Windows Media. For optimal viewing on larger screens and for in-screen viewing of powerpoint presentations, prior download of Windows Media is recommended.
Program:
29. September 05
GMT 15:30 h / CANADA 8:30 am
keynote Edmond Couchot: Towards the Autonomous Image
16:30h / 9:30 am – opening plenary – MediaArtHistories: Times & Landscapes 1
(Chairs: Oliver Grau and Gunalan Nadarajan )
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 nanoart). Media Art History 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. This session will offer a first overview about the visible influence of media art on all fields of art.
Speakers: Gunalan Nadarajan, Luise Poissant, Oliver Grau, Mario Carpo
17:30h / 11:30 am – plenary Methodologies
(Chair: Mark Hansen and Erkki Huhtamo)
Critical overview of which methods art history has been using during the past to approach media art.
Speakers: Mark Hansen, Erkki Huhtamo, Irina Aristarkhova, Andreas Broeckmann
21:10h / 2:10 pm – plenary – Image Science and Representation: From a Cognitive Point of View
(Chair: Barbara Stafford)
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 neuro scientists. 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? Historical as well as elusive electronic media from the vantage of an embodied and distributed brain.
Speakers: Barbara Stafford, Kristin Veel, Christine Ross, Phillip Thurtle &
Claudia X. Valdes, Christopher Salter, Tim Clark
12:25 h / 4:25 pm – concurrent session 1 – Art as Research / Artists as Inventors
(Chair: Dieter Daniels)
Do “innovations” and “inventions” in the field of art differ from those in the field of technology and science? Have artists contributed anything “new” to those fields of research?
Speakers: Dieter Daniels, Chris Meigh-Andrews, Fred Turner, Simon Penny,
Cornelius Borck
concurrent session 2 – MediaArtHistories: Times and Landscapes 2
(Chairs: Edward Shanken and Charlie Gere)
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.
Speakers: Edward Shanken, Charlie Gere, Grant Taylor, Darko Fritz & Margit
Rosen, Sylvie Lacerte, Anne Collins Goodyear, Caroline Langill, Maria
Fernandez
30. September 05
GMT 15:45 h / 8:45 am – plenary Collecting, Preserving and Archiving the Media Arts
(Chair: Jean Gagnon)
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?
Speakers: Jean Gagnon, Christiane Paul, Peter Weibel, Jon Ippolito
18:00 h / 11:00 am – concurrent session 1 – Database/New Scientific Tools
(Chairs: Rudolf Frieling and Oliver Grau)
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?
Speakers: Oliver Grau, Rudolf Frieling, Sandra Fauconnier, Christian Berndt,
Alain Depocas, Anne-Marie Duguet
concurrent session 2 – Pop/Mass/Society
(Chairs: Machiko Kusahara and Andreas Lange)
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 panel examines concrete forms, e.g. computer games, determining the cultural context and what consequences they could have for the understanding of art in the 21st century.
Speakers: Machiko Kusahara, Andreas Lange, Karen Keifer-Boyd, Tobey
Crockett, Mark Tribe
3:00 h / 8:00 pm
Rudolf Arnheim Lecture:
Sarat Maharaj: Xeno-Epistemics: Global Migrations and other Ways’ of Knowing
1. October 05
GMT 15:30 pm / Canada 8:30 am – plenary – Cross-Culture – Global Art
(Chair: Sara Diamond)
This panel provides an opportunity to put a special focus on cross-cultural influences, the global and the local. 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? How does globalization and the construction of global contexts such as festivals and biennials effect local new media practices?
Speakers: Sara Diamond, Sheila Petty, Mary Leigh Morbey, Thomas
Riccio, Aparna Sharma, Laura Marks
17:45 h / 10:45 am – concurrent session 1
Cross Diciplinary Research Methods
(Chairs: Ron Burnett and Frieder Nake)
The pressure to become interdisciplinary is very intense – coming from a variety of disciplines and institutions. Ironically, this pressure has been around for a very long time. So, why don’t we just strive for excellence irrespective of discipline? Don’t the artistic practices within the field of New Media push us in that direction anyway?
Speakers: Frieder Nake, Ron Burnett, Dot Tuer, Guy Sui Durand, Michael
Century, David Tomas, Will Straw
concurrent session 2 – Rejuvenate: Film, Sound and Music in Media Arts History
(Chairs: Douglas Kahn and Sean Cubitt)
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.
Speakers: Douglas Kahn, Sean Cubitt, Keith Sanborn, Scott Bukatman
20:45 h / 1:45 pm
keynote Lucia Santaella: The Semiosis of Media Art, Science and Technology
21:45 h / 2:45 pm – concurerent session 1 – Collaborative Practice/ Networking (History)
(Chairs: Ryszard Kluszczynski and Diana Domingues)
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. The dataflow created new economies and new forms of human communication.
Speakers: Ryszard Kluszczynski, Diana Domingues, Nina Czegledy, Todd Davis,
Douglas Jarvis, Jeremy Turner, Margaret Dolinsky
concurrent session 2 – What Can the History of New Media Learn from History of Science/Science Studies?
(Chair: Linda Henderson)
Science and technology have been an important part of the cultural field in the 20th 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.
Speakers: Timothy Lenoir, Linda Henderson, Timothy Druckrey,
Simon Werrett, Yann Chateigné
12:00 am / 5:00 pm – concurrent session 1 – High Art/Low Culture – the Future of Media Art Sciences?
(Chair: Karin Bruns)
The panel aims to bring together the methodological fields of media studies and media art history. Rather than limiting their focus to canonical works of art new studies in media art production blend methods and issues from art history and media sciences as well as from communication studies, sociology, techno sciences, art history, cultural and postcolonial studies.
Speakers: Karin Bruns, Yara Guasque, Andy Polaine, Claus Pias, Barbara Paul
concurrent session 2 – History of Institutions
(Chairs: Itsuo Sakane and Jasia Reichardt)
There are inevitable parallels between the development of what we now call media art and life at large. Excess of information leads to insecurity – what to believe, what to select, what to keep and what to discard. Sustainability, conservation, education and access are topics relevant to today’s media art, and as relevant to it as to our natural resources. Now that media art has a history, how do we keep track of it and preserve it?
Speakers: Itsuo Sakane, Jasia Reichardt, Michael Naimark, Peter Richards,
Johannes Göbel, Andreas Broeckmann (Discussant)