Digital Art and the Urban Environment: a Symposium, Art Exhibition, and Scholarly Volume

First Call for Participation

Digital Art and the Urban Environment: a Symposium, Art Exhibition, and Scholarly Volume

Location: Pace University, Downtown Manhattan, New York City

Date: Friday, October 4, 2013

Sponsors: Pace Digital Gallery, Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems, and the Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies

Digital and new media artists utilize innovations in locative media, tracking technologies, telecommunication networks, and novel computer interfaces to craft artworks that create new ways to connect with the city. Just as their predecessors transformed urban neighborhoods, such as New York’s SoHo and Chelsea, through their energy and imagination, today’s artists are altering our perceptions of, and relationships with, urban space though their digital inventions and interventions. Thus, it is the purpose of this symposium, art exhibition, and scholarly volume to formally appraise the ways new media and digital artists engage urban ecology. It seeks to gather together contributions from artists, architects, computer scientists, designers, urban planners, social scientists, critical theorists, and others to consider these new modes of seeing, representing, and connecting within the urban setting.

There are three possible ways to participate:

1. Symposium. Propose an oral presentation, dialog, panel, or other form of audience engagement for the symposium. Topics can range from reviews of how technology supports digital artistic practice to social studies of how a group or community is engaged by the work of digital and new media artists – and everything in between.

The proposal should be approximately 300 words in length, include a very short list of important references, the names and affiliations of the presenters, along with a brief bio of each. Papers related to all accepted presentations will be considered for the edited scholarly volume (see below).

2. Edited Scholarly Volume. The goal of the scholarly volume is to define and contextualize the ways new media and digital artists engage the urban environment and its population. It seeks chapter proposals that describe theories, applications, analyses, case studies, reviews, histories, and manifestos that include, but art not limited to:

• Artistic and design practices for the urban setting
• Artist, designer, scientist, technologist collaborations
• Artistic creations and practice based on scientific/technological models and simulations
• Virtual and physical information artifacts related to, or created through, artistic and design processes
• Artistic mapping of information within the urban setting
• The relationship between information spaces and urban spaces
• The role of the viewer in urban art
• How digital artistic practice engages communities within the urban setting
• Technological advances supporting urban art
• User interfaces supporting urban art

As with the symposium proposal, a chapter proposal should be approximately 300 words in length, include a very short list of important references, the names and affiliations of the presenters, along with a brief bio of each. It is anticipated that the scholarly volume will be published by a major international publisher.

3. Art Exhibition. Artists are invited to submit artwork related to the symposium theme for display either within the Pace Digital Gallery or through its website (http://csis.pace.edu/digitalgallery/index.html ). Artists should submit a short proposal describing their artwork, a brief biography, and the URL of their websites. All artwork in the show will be documented in the show’s catalog.

Important Information:
Due Date: All submissions are due by Sunday, July 13, 2012.

All proposals for symposia presentations, book chapters, artwork, and any other inquiries should be emailed to:

Dr. Francis T. Marchese
Pace Digital Gallery
&
Department of Computer Science
Pace University
163 William Street, 2nd Floor
NY, NY 10038

Email: [email protected]
Academic Web page: http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese
Pace Digital Gallery Web page: http://csis.pace.edu/digitalgallery/