[rohrpost] CFP: MediaArtHistories at CIHA 2020 world congress, Pao Paulo

[Oliver Grau]

CIHA world congress 2020, Sao Paulo with MediaArtHistories Session

Migration, Climate, Surveillance – What does Media Arts Complexity
want?
(Sess. 5)

Chairs:
Giselle BEIGUELMAN, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo
Oliver GRAU, Danube University, Austria
Nara Cristina SANTOS, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Santa Maria

MediaArtHistories is an interdisciplinary field of research that
explores the current
developments as well as the history and genealogy of new media art,
digital art, and
electronic art. (GRAU 2007, DOMINGUES 2009). On the one hand, media
art
histories address the contemporary interplay of art, technology, and
science. (WILSON 2010,
HENDERSON 1983) It aims to reveal the historical relationships and
aspects of the
‘afterlife’ (Aby Warburg) in new media art by means of a historical
comparative approach.
This strand of research encompasses questions of the history of media
and perception, of so-
called archetypes, as well as those of iconography and the history of
ideas. Moreover, one of
the main agendas of media art histories is to point out the role of
digital technologies for
contemporary, post-industrial societies and to counteract the
marginalization of according art
practices and art objects as pointed out in the Liverpool Declaration:
″Digital technology has

fundamentally changed the way art is made. Over the last fifty years,
media art has become a
significant part of our networked information society. Although there
are well-attended
international festivals, collaborative research projects, exhibitions
and database
documentation resources, media art research is still marginal in
universities, museums and
archives. It remains largely under-resourced in our core cultural
institutions (5a) Hence,
scholars stress that the technological advances in current media
cultures are best understood
on the backdrop of an extensive media and art history. Contributions to
this field are
widespread and include researchers who have disciplinary focuses such
as the history of
science (Lorraine Daston), art history and image science (Oliver Grau,
Barbara Stafford,
Jonathan Crary), media studies and media archaeology (Friedrich
Kittler, Erkki Huhtamo,
Siegfried Zielinski), sound studies (Douglas Kahn), film studies (Sean
Cubitt, Jorge La
Ferla), media art aesthetics (Christiane Paul, Giselle Beiguelman, Lev
Manovich), archives
(Grau, Beiguelman).

The term new media art itself is of great importance to the field. The
focus of new
media art lies in the cultural, political, and social implications as
well as the aesthetic
possibilities – more or less its ‘media-specificity’ – of
digital media. Furthermore, the field of
new media art is increasingly influenced by new technologies that
surmount a traditional
understanding of (art) media. The list of genres that are commonly
subsumed under the label
of new media art illustrates its broad scope and includes, among
others, virtual art,
Software Art, Internet Art, Glitch Art, Telematic Art, Bio Art /
Genetic Art, Interactive
Art, computer animation and graphics, Urban Media Art, Mobile Art,
Hacktivism and Tactical Media. These latter two ‘genres’ in
particular have a strong focus on
the interplay of art and (political) activism. Recently, with the
development with
Artificial Intelligence, there is also an emerging trend exploring its
aesthetics.
The diversity of fields makes clear that digital art with its histories
is a complex
system, which is not only complicated but has rapidly-accelerating
complexity. With the
Algorithmic, Computational and even Post-digital turn over recent
decades, the digital image
is becoming contextual, ephemeral, immersive, interactive and
processual, made as it is out
of many technologies.

This session addresses the role Media Art plays in today’s
sociopolitical issues such
as migration, climate, virtual finance, and surveillance society. We
welcome going beyond
state-of-the-art analytic methods in the humanities, combining for
example qualitative close-
gaze (of critical visual analysis) and the quantitative distant-reading
(from computer-assisted
data analysis/empirical research). A main session outcome is added
value for the humanities
with “a socio-political iconography of the present”, and discussion
of a new “way of seeing”,
of “thinking with pictures”, and asking “what do complex images
want?” in the Digital Age.
Therefore, this session welcomes as well proposals for adequate
research
infrastructures following the Liverpool Declaration, which was signed
by scholars and artists
based at institutions all over the globe to develop systematic
strategies to fulfill the task that
digital culture and its research demands in the 21st Century
(http://www.mediaarthistory.org/declaration).

This session focuses on an evaluation of the status of the
meta-discipline
MediaArtHistories today. Immersed in both contemporary and
historiographical aspects of
the digital world, we explore the most immediate socio-cultural
questions of our time: from
migration and media (r)evolutions, to climate, virtualization of
finance and surveillance. And
we do so through a fractal lens of inter- and trans-disciplinarity,
bridging art history, media
studies, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and beyond.

We welcome papers across disciplines, territories and times preferably
in the
following themes:

- MediaArtHistories historiographies and futures of an ever-emerging
field;
- Media Art & Politics (migration, surveillance, climate, etc.);
- Comparative studies on “medium” across different times;
- Institutional histories of Media Art;
- Archiving, collecting, preserving and representing Media Art;
- Digitization of historic collections: Their managing and control.
Repatriation of
cultural objects in a digital form?;
- Methodologies and research tools for MediaArtHistories with a focus
on Digital
Humanities;
- International and local histories and practices of media art. How are
media arts used
in different parts of the world (high tech/low tech..);
- (Post-)Colonial experiences and non-Western histories of media art,
science and technology;
- Paradigm shift Digital vs. Post-Digital Theory;
- Media Art aesthetics of memory (dataviz, defunct media, glitch
etc.).

http://www.ciha.org/content/s%C3%A3o-paulo-2020-motion-migrations-call-papers-open-now



Univ.-Prof. Dr. habil. Dr. h.c. Oliver Grau, MAE
Chair Professor for Image Science and Head of the Department
Chair Erasmus Joint Master of Excellence in MediaArtsCultures
DANUBE UNIVERSITY
Dr.-Karl-Dorrek-Strasse 30
3500 Krems, AUSTRIA www.donau-uni.ac.at/dbw 
ADA – Archive of Digital Art www.digitalartarchive.at 
Graphische Sammlung Goettweig-Online www.gssg.at