Call for proposals: The Infinite Genealogy: Intercultural Approaches to New Media Art

Call for proposals
The Infinite Genealogy: Intercultural Approaches to New Media Art
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, May 2006

The Infinite Genealogy is a conference for international scholars, artists, and researchers from a variety of fields to explore non-Western genealogies and intercultural understandings of contemporary new media art. Submissions are invited for papers and artists’ presentations and performances.

The premise of this conference is that contemporary new media are already informed by the histories, knowledges, and worldviews that come to us from Chinese, Indian, Arab, African, indigenous, and other worlds of science, mathematics, cosmology, spirituality, and technology. We are interested not only in non-Western adaptations and critiques of new media, but also in affinities and historical connections between new media and traditional and “hybrid” cultural practices. The goal is to refresh our understandings of new media in the light of traditional cultural paradigms; and to locate the most interesting emergent approaches that result. The conference will bring together people from the disciplines of art history, cinema and media studies, music, communications, anthropology, history of technology, history of science, history of mathematics, computer programming, biology, and physics; and artists working in and across these disciplines.

Examples of topics: Traditional cosmologies as models for digital virtuality; ethnomathematics and new media; non-Western models for algorithmic and computative art forms (e.g. calligraphy); traditional understandings of autopoesis and artificial life; worldviews from which to approach genetics; how cultural understandings of communication inform new media practice; specific ways in which spirituality and mysticism inform new media; how traditional algorithms inform musical composition; textiles as proto-digital media; cross-cultural understandings of embodiment and performance.

Submissions for papers and artists’ presentations should include a 500-word abstract, equipment requirements, and a curriculum vitae. We plan to accommodate a variety of lengths and formats of presentation, but presentations of 30 minutes stand the best chance of acceptance.

Deadline: December 1, 2005
Send to: Laura Marks, [email protected] (Please DO NOT send to [email protected])
For inquiries and to be on mailing list: [email protected]