Updated 8 August 2011
Online registration for the conference is now closed. If you are interested in attending and have not registered, please contact David Cecchetto to make alternate arrangements.
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Updated 3 August 2011
The final draft of the conference program can be downloaded here. If you do NOT wish to receive a paper version of this program, please contact David Cecchetto prior to Monday 8 August. As always, don't hesitate to ask any questions; we look forward to seeing you all soon!
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Updated 10 June 2011
A draft of the conference program can be downloaded here, and registration is now open for the conference! Click the button below to pay via Paypal; feel free to contact David Cecchetto if you have any questions about the program or to arrange an alternate form of payment. We encourage you to make every effort to register by 10 July.
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UPDATE: Keynote Abstracts
Updated 25 May 2011
We are thrilled to announce the titles and abstracts for our two keynote addresses:
Charlie Gere: Photography in the Time that Remains
In this paper I look at photography as exemplary of ‘the time that remains’, as Giorgio Agamben describes the messianic temporality that he sees as connecting St. Paul and Walter Benjamin. Photography was invented at more or less the exact moment Hegel first proclaimed the ‘death of God’ in the third decade of the 19th century. I suggest that this is more than coincidental and that it is bound up with the end of onto-theology and the rise of a different conception of time and duration based on rupture rather than continuity. I look at this idea through the work of Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jacob Taubes. Finally I ask what might be the fate of photography’s messianic temporality in a culture dominated by so-called ‘real-time’ technologies.
Christine Ross: Duration as 'something we do' in recent media art spectatorship
Defining the process of remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have argued that new media practices reach their cultural significance not by divorcing themselves from but by refashioning earlier media. Following this perspective, virtual reality has remediated the panorama; augmented reality has remediated installation art; and photography has refashioned painting. The remediation theory of mediation is crucial in its disclosure of a recurring trait in the history of media development: digital technologies never simply erase previous analogue media; and the temporalities associated with analogue images never simply disappear when digital images achieve their cultural significance. But how are these temporalities refashioned? How and why has duration—a transformed, post-Bergsonian duration—become one of the main temporalities by which time is made to unfold in media aesthetic experiences today? And how does it unfold? These are some of the main questions underlying this paper which seeks to examine filmic and mixed reality practices that explore intermediality and extended/enactive models of perception to institute “inter-durational” experiences of the image and space. Special attention will be given to the enactive perceptual experience of the viewer/user in mixed reality art, as “something we do” and not simply as “something that happens to us” as a pure brain process. (Alva Noë, Action in Perception, 2004). The unfolding of duration in these so-called post-media environments is inseparable from the viewer/user’s perceptual experience as a tactile enactment in space and time, whose content is not only conditioned by the body in action (by what we do—from eye movements to full body movements) but also by the perceiver’s possession of bodily skills (by what we know how to do—from sensorimotor knowledge to the implicit understanding of sensorimotor regularities).
These speakers are made possible through the generous contribution of the Office of the President, OCAD University.
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Updated 21 March, 2011
We are thrilled to confirm two exciting and distinguished keynote speakers for our gathering, Dr. Charlie Gere (Lancaster University, UK) and Dr. Christine Ross (McGill University, Canada).
Dr. Charlie Gere is reader in New Media Research in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University, United Kingdom. He is the author of Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002), Art, Time and Technology (Berg, 2006), and co-editor of White Heat Cold Technology (MIT Press, 2009), as well as many papers on questions of technology, media and art. In 2007 he co-curated Feedback, a major exhibition on art responsive to instructions, input, or its environment, in Gijon, Northern Spain.
Dr. Christine Ross is Professor and James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and co-editor of Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008). Her current book project examines the temporal turn in contemporary art.
These speakers are made possible through the generous contribution of the Office of the President, OCAD University.
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CFP: Duration (Before and) After MediaDistributed February 2011
In the context of ubiquitous technology, the question of duration has emerged as a powerful interdisciplinary tool for investigating the interstices that both separate and sustain medial, technological, cultural, and artistic activities. Indeed, as claims to a post-media characterization of our digital landscape collide with deeply disciplined artistic and intellectual practices, questions of the body, the human, the flesh, the social, and even time become increasingly difficult to pose (let alone answer). Thus, duration--a concept with variegated genealogies in Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, and others, as well as in most artistic disciplines--suggests a point of intervention that avows the multiplicity of the problem: what happens to duration after media? How might duration fold together pre- and post-digital practices in ways that differ from disciplinary histories? How do locative, mobile, and ubiquitous media practices (artistic or otherwise) mobilize duration, and what might we learn from these?
We invite paper presentations on these and other questions relating to duration for a small conference taking place from 10-12 August, 2011 at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Theoretical interventions as well as practical or case-study models will all be considered. Fewer than 30 presentations will be accepted for this gathering, so emphasis will be placed on establishing conversations towards the development of an innovative edited collection on the same topic.
Please email a 250 word abstract and 75 word bio to David Cecchetto at dcecchetto@faculty.ocad.ca before Friday 22 April, 2011. Participants will be notified of acceptance in early May.
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Appel à communications: La Durée et les médias
Dans le contexte de la technologie omniprésente, la durée ouvre une interrogation importante sur les interstices qui écartent et soutiennent en même temps les pratiques technologiques, culturelles et artistiques. À vrai dire, lorsque les tentatives post-médiatiques de caractériser le champ du numérique s’affrontent aux pratiques artistiques et intellectuelles enfoncées dans leurs disciplines particulières, des questions du corps, de l’être humain, de la chair, du social et même du temps sont de plus en plus difficiles à poser (voire à répondre). Concept de provenance généalogique plurielle — chez Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, entre autres, de même que dans la plupart des disciplines artisques —, la durée nous propose ainsi une perspective qui reconnaît la multiplicité du problème. Que se passe-t-il avec la durée après les médias? Comment la durée peut-elle englober les pratiques pré et postmédiatiques de façon nouvelle? Comment les pratiques médiatiques situées, mobiles et omniprésentes (artistiques ou non) manifestent-elles la durée, et que peut-on y voir?
Nous sollicitons des communications sur ces questions et d’autres liées à la durée pour un petit colloque qui aura lieu entre le 10 et le 12 août 2011 à l’Université OCAD à Toronto, Canada. Des perspectives théoriques et pratiques aussi bien que des modèles d’études de cas seront pris en compte. Moins de 30 projets de communication seront acceptés pour ce colloque, et le poids sera mis sur l’établissement d’un numéro collectif portant sur le même sujet.
Veuillez envoyer par courrier électronique un projet de communication de 250 mots ainsi qu’un petit bio de 75 mots à David Cecchetto , dcecchetto@faculty.ocad.ca , avant le 22 avril 2011. Les participants seront notifiés au début du mois de mai.