[rohrpost] CFP: Art and Speculative Futures, International Conference, Barcelona: 27-29 October, 2016

[Ingeborg Reichle]

ART AND SPECULATIVE FUTURES
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2016

Barcelona, 27-29 October, 2016

Department of Art History, Universitat de Barcelona

Deadline CFP: June 15th, 2016

https://artfuturesconference.wordpress.com/eng/call-for-papers/

Thinking about art from the prism of speculation may involve the
creation of alternative futures. Introducing doubt, babbling, the
“what ifs”, counter-memory against the ideal need of a primal origin
(or source of meaning where we recognise each other) and being open to
discontinuity, chance and materiality in history means asking
ourselves if it is possible to both make and think about art in
different ways. If it is possible to envision another history from
other horizons of meaning, not so much to pursuit its truth but to
question the meaning and the value embedded in the stories of our
truths. This conference thus proposes to speculate about futures as
contemporary fables producing truth effects imbued with ethical and
political significance. Speculations over futures within the arts seek
to contradict traditional modes of conceiving art history by means of
meanings that stimulate thinking rather than generating new truths
with which we align ourselves. Fables or stories that make people
think, like toolboxes, upon which history is being “fictionalized”
from a political reality that makes it true, just the same way
politics which does not yet exist are being “fictionalized” from a
historical reality.

We seek to explore not only one but multiple senses, not one but
multiple and diverse art histories, ignored or omitted, including
artists, materials, technologies or excluded geopolitical zones of
repeated and commonly accepted stories. Such histories of art are to
be investigated and revealed from a cosmopolitical scope that is aimed
at building a common space where no one can claim the right to choose
the central point of view from which a subject must be addressed. A
space of coexistence of the otherness without the need of articulating
consensus: a space of coexistence in the divergence that accounts for
our constitutive heterogeneity.

This conference aims at assembling differences in semantic-materials
skeins of all those agents involved in the art world, whether they are
visible or invisible to be revealed, human or non-human, objects,
materials, speeches, technologies or relational infrastructures that
build and are in turn built as specific forms of governance. Precisely
these art infrastructures, inherited from the Enlightenment, promised
modernity, development and progress, but their lives have been shown
to be made of fragile relationships between people, things, and
institutions that try to govern them. Today its very fragility allows
us to approach these infrastructures through maintenance and repair in
order to shed light on actors, places and moments that have been
overlooked or silenced by their stories.

This conference will examine alternative art histories that are
committed to the material turn while moving forward, hand in hand,
with methodological-theoretical perspectives such as media
archaeology, new materialism, speculative realism or actor-network
theory and social studies of science and technology exploring the
world of the arts by means of speculation. Approaches that have
already placed their focus on relationships, dismantling modern maxims
that keep nature, society and technology confined.
The different research lines of the conference will be:

•    Divergent and uncategorizable art histories, from a non-linear
temporal approach, linked to perspectives of media archaeology or
anarchive on the one hand and heteronymous or abject art approaches on
the other.

•    Processes of rendering visible and invisible agents and agencies
in the arts, linked to discourses on the human and nonhuman –
regardless of whether these are animals, microbes or things-, the
Anthropocene and reconstruction of the relationship between nature,
technology and society.

•    Processes of rupture, maintenance and repairing practices related
to art and infrastructure, linked to exhibitions, museums and
exhibition centres or production and research spaces, etc …

•    Cosmopolitical approaches from the arts whose anti-homogenizing
potential aims at describing the possibilities of mutual co-existence
and living with difference, understanding of the creation of any
political horizon that is based on the creation of sustainable
relationships with otherness.

•    Diffractive approaches to the arts from a situated knowledge
related to posthumanism and postgender studies.

Keywords: alien, non human, non linear, uncategorized, divergent
histories, an-archives, situated knowledge, diffractive, abject,
anthropocene, posthumanism, dispositif etc..

People who are interested in participating are invited to send an
abstract by June 15th, 2016 to the following e-mail address:
artfuturesconference at gmail.com.

Proposal format (two separate documents):

Abstract:
•    Format .doc, .docx, .rtf, .odt
•    Languages: English, Spanish and Catalan
•    Title
•    Abstract (300 words maximum)
•    Between 3 and 5 keywords.
•    Short biography:
•    Format .doc, .docx, .rtf, .odt
•    Languages: English, Spanish and Catalan
•    Name and surname
•    Institutional affiliation (in case of having it)
•    Email address
•    Brief curriculum (100 words maximum)
•    Information and contact person (only if the communication is
presented by more than one author)
•    Abstract title

You will receive confirmation of acceptance of the proposed
presentation by July 5th, 2015. The papers will be published in a ISBN
publication edited by Universitat de Barcelona. Each paper is
allocated 15 minutes and will be followed by a discussion.

Organized by the the Research Groups AGI (Art, Globalization,
Interculturality) and AASD (Art, Architecture and Digital Society)
from the University of Barcelona (UB), the Research Group Mediaccions
from the  Open University of Catalonia (UOC) and Arts Santa Mònica.
27th, 28th, and 29th October, 2016 at the Department of Art History
(UB). c/ Montalegre 6-8. 08001 Barcelona

CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS

Lourdes Cirlot (Department of Art History. Universitat de Barcelona)
Anna Maria Guasch (Department of Art History. Universitat de Barcelona)
Pau Alsina (Studies of Art and Humanities. Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Elisenda Ardevol (Estudis d’Arts i Humanitats. Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya)
Nerea Calvillo (University of Warwick)
Fernando Domínguez Rubio (University of California San Diego)
Maria Antonia González (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México)
Daniel López (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute)
Marsha Meskimmon (Loughborough University)
Sarah Pink (RMIT University)
Ingeborg Reichle (University of Applied Arts Vienna)
Chris Salter (Concordia University)
Juan Francisco Salázar (Wester Sydney University)

ORGANIZING TEAM

Christian Alonso (Department of Art History. Universitat de Barcelona)
Pau Alsina (Studies of Art and Humanities. Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya)
Anna Maria Guasch (Department of Art History. Universitat de Barcelona)
Vanina Hofman (Studies of Art and Humanities. Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya)
Débora Lanzeni (Studies of Art and Humanities. Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya)
Daniel López del Rincón (Department of Art History. Universitat de
Barcelona)
Magda Polo (Department of Art History. Universitat de Barcelona)
Lara F. Portolés Argüelles (Studies of Art and Humanities. Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya)
Victor Ramírez (Department of Art History. Universitat de Barcelona)
Ana Rodríguez (Studies of Art and Humanities. Universitat Oberta de
Catalunya)
Eugenie Maria Theuer (Department of English. University of Vienna |
Department of Art History. Universitat de Barcelona)

Conference funded by the project “Arte, arquitectura y nuevas
materialidades” (HAR2014-59261-C2-1-P) and “Cartografía crítica del
arte y la visualidad en la era de lo global: Nuevas metodologías,
conceptos y enfoques analíticos II Parte” (HAR2013-43122P) and Grup
Consolidat Agència d´Ajuts Universitaris de la Generalitat de
Catalunya (2014 SGR1050). Research groups Art, Architecture and
Digital Society and Art, Globalization, Interculturality.



Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ingeborg Reichle
Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien /
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Abteilung Medientheorie / Media Theory
Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2
1010 Wien, Austria
www.dieangewandte.at