DASH Archives - September 2005

LIVE STREAMING
Refresh!  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 web streaming 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.  Web streaming is available in Quick 
time and Windows Media. For optimal viewing on 
larger screens and for in-screen viewing of power 
point 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)