Call: The Borders of Digital Art

The Borders of Digital Art
The Digital Arts Project

Tuesday 15th September – Thursday 17th September 2015
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Presentations:

The digital arts are constantly developing with an ever growing number of new branches (i.e. hybrid art, digital musics, interactive art, animation/FX, game production, curating creative communities, urban gaming, application design, bioart, hacktivism, generic architecture, urban hacking, big data visualisation, etc.). Many of these enter and change the entertainment and media industry and often promote the exploration of various aspects of human life, philosophical issues, anthropological, social, political and judicial problems. Consequently they are strongly connected with the processes around the merging of boundaries between the humanities, sciences (biotechnology, genetics, physics, chemistry, product fabrication, engineering, robotics, neurosciences etc.) and technology. The influence of information and telecommunication technologies and computer mediated communication on various aspects of our everyday life and resulting problems are often presented in aesthetically appealing, shocking or hardly understandable form in digital artworks. Thus the digital arts can be seen as the field of particular interest and investigation for specific conditions and concerns of the 21st century. The project then stems from the idea of the inseparability of science, the arts and technology and lies in deep hope that the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussions concerning the problems of the forms of individual perception, history of creative tools, social impact, political meaning and cultural contexts of art and technology as well as educational, institutional and economic aspects of digital arts and entertainment are essential for understanding the contemporary problems of humanity.

This interdisciplinary project aims to explore various contexts of the digital arts and entertainment creation, production and reception. We invite participants with various areas of interest (media studies, game studies, literary studies, cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, museology, pedagogics, economy, law to name just a few) and professional backgrounds: theoreticians, practitioners, artists, scientists, professionals working for the creative industry, cultural institutions or business. Our goal is to examine, explore and engage with the many issues created by the massive exploitation of digital technologies for inter-human communication in respect to the arts, technology, media and history.

Proposals, presentations, workshops, performances and reports are invited on any of the following themes:

1) Digital Arts Theory and History:

  • Digital arts history and histories: Theories, methodologies, concepts, aesthetics
  • Archeology of new media, development of key interfaces in digital arts
  • Artistic strategies vs. tactics of reception: Styles, trends, artists and movements
  • Virtual, digital, analogue and other crucial categories: Aesthetics, philosophies and strategies
  • Representation and remediation: Genres and their mutations
  • Archiving and preservation methods
  • Big data as real problem, challenge and ideology

2) Categories and Fields of Digital Arts – New Areas, Models, Examples:

  • Hybrid art-mixed media and its use, analogue and digital tools, city space as medium, etc.
  • Digital musics i.e. soundscapes, audiowalks as medium, digital musics and its visualisation, city/body as instrument, etc.
  • Interactive art i.e. objects vs. actors of interaction, body as interactive object, interactive spaces, virtual reality, interactive systems as AI, etc.
  • Animation/FX i.e. new techniques and ideas, trends in mass production, visual experiments, joining digital and analogue tools, visualisation problems, etc.
  • Curating creative communities (community as artistic project, cultural animation and new media competencies, creating community – problems and advantages, group creation – designing the process, how to create an interesting project with social interest, etc.
  • Bioart i.e. body as art work, experiments with genetics, experiments in implanting, body as communication tool, reinventing biology, technology and biology, human – cyborg – robot, human – hybrid – animal, what next?, etc.
  • Hacktivism i.e. means of hacktivism, creating social change, masters of hacktivism, consequences of art making, urban hacking – goals and concepts, etc.

3) Borders of Humanity – Borders of Art:

  • Idea of experimentation and its borders
  • Shock – better than indifference?
  • Morality and immorality of digital art, artists and creative industries
  • Transhumanism in art – artist in posthuman era
  • Digital art as ideology or new religion
  • Art – science – technology (genetics, robotics, medicine, programming, etc. as art form

4) Digital Artworks, Digital Arts Festivals and Cultural Institutions:

  • Ethnography of digital arts
  • Social impact of digital arts, art as means of social change
  • Digital arts as part of cultural politics and ideology
  • Digital arts and entertainment/creative industry
  • Gamification of aesthetic experience
  • Digital arts festivals and its public

5) Digital Arts as Education and/or Business:

  • Cultural animation and education vs. entertainment and new media business
  • Medialabs, fablabs, banks of knowledge, hackatons, and other new institutions
  • Digital arts at school, digital arts schools
  • Psychology of digital arts perception and creation
  • Economies of digital world – models, ideas, case studies
  • Establishing new law for digital arts and new media
  • Digital arts and judicial problems

6) Digital Arts as Digital Cultural Heritage:

  • Nextgen art databases and image collections
  • Media libraries and virtual museums today
  • Multimodal interfaces and emergent technologies in digital arts presentation
  • Collection-building, curatorial practices and preservation
  • Digitisation and dissemination of classical art
  • Recording and archiving of live events and performances
  • Collaborative creation, use and access to data
  • Data visualisation and mapping
  • Digital arts, digital memory and its deficits

Subsequently we encourage submission of proposals for short workshops, practitioner-based activities, best practice showcases, how-to sessions, live demonstrations, performances, and pre-formed panels. We particularly welcome short film screenings; photographic essays; installations; interactive talks and alternative presentation styles that encourage engagement.

What to Send:

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 1st May 2015. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 10th July 2015. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: DA2 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Anna Maj: annamaj@inter-disciplinary.net
Rob Fisher: da2@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the ‘Critical Issues’ series of research projects run by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.

For further details of the conference, please visit: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/cyber/digital-arts/call-for-presentations/

Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

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