Historiographies of New Media: CFP

Call for Papers (Deadline November 28)
Historiographies of New Media

The Chicago Art Journal, the annual publication of the University of Chicago Department of Art History, is seeking submissions of original work by graduate students and faculty for its 2011-2012 edition. This year’s issue asks how new media have affected not only the production of art, but also the production of knowledge about art. What is at stake in approaching art history through the concept of new media?

The term ‘new media’ has been applied to a range of formats (from photography to video to the internet) that have revolutionized the modes of transmission and reproduction of ‘old’ media of art--particularly in the post WWII period. Although the concept of new media seems to promise a mass media address, artists have often emphasized the limits of circulation—for instance, in closed circuit television, or zines that made use of Xerox processes and yet were distributed to small networks through the mail. Such a dialectical relation escapes media theory’s emphasis on mass distribution, and points instead toward misalignments and points of friction between the imaginative and material aspects of new media. Furthermore, from the double slide lecture to the publication of photographs in books, and from the use of facsimiles in the classroom to broadcasts of ‘art on television,’ the formation and performance of the art historical discipline has itself been contingent upon pivotal introductions of reproductive media. In turning our attention to new media, we consider art history’s rhetorics of description and display. What conditions of possibility are embedded (or not) in the positioning of art as new media? How might we emphasize the aesthetic and pedagogical aspects of new media over notions that emerged out of communications theory, such as interactivity? We are especially interested in papers that address new media art histories that diverge from the well-known chronologies of Euro-American technological developments.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

-performance and circulation of art history through facsimiles, photographs,

slide projections, radio, and television

-responses and counter-responses to new media technologies within art criticism, critical theory, and film theory

-legacies of Friedrich Kittler and Miriam Hansen for theorizing new media

-analog and digital in art and art history

-historical modes of mechanical reproduction, imprinted coins, technologies of the book, seals, etc.

-transfers and transformations among media, media as reference for other media

- in what way are new media performative and public?

-materiality of new media, processes of materials

-new media and abstraction

-wider implications of artists’ practices in Xerox, zines, artists’ books, flip books, holograms, etc.

-relationship between art transmitted through media and art as media

-aesthetics of television

-new media’s relevance for reframing art historical cycles and geographies of innovation

-art and technology movements, including the role of dance and ‘new music’

-computerized models of art, computational ways of thinking

-collectivity and coalitions, notions of ‘social media’

-photography as new media

-historiographies of ‘video art,’ including the role of projection

-queer aesthetics and new media

-painting after the advent of network theory

Submissions:

* Full papers must follow The Chicago Manual of Style, and should not exceed 4000 words. Each submission should include an abstract of approximately

500 words. If you would like to submit an abstract without a full paper, please contact the editors in advance. Both Word documents and PDFs are welcome.

* All contributors should include their name, address, telephone number, and email address. Authors are responsible for securing image reproduction rights and any associated fees.

Please send submissions to the graduate student editors Solveig Nelson and Stephanie Su atUChicagoArtJournal@gmail.com by November 28, 2011.