Call for papers for Summer Session, Tyrefjord, Norway, July 19th – 26th, 2009
It has often been said that the computer, the world wide web and digitalization has revolutionized the way we access and use media and consequently the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Digitalization differs from all previous media revolutions, because all previous media are translatable to digital code. Whereas media used to differ in material expression – paper for print, the screen for TV – then digital media needs just one platform: the computer. Text, images, sound can all be produced and reproduced on the computer.
It has been predicted that digitalization and the computer would make all other media obsolete. However, we can observe today how this is not the case. Despite being declared dead with the emergence of the CD, records are still printed on vinyl – and in increasing numbers. Audiophiles prefer the analogue sound of vinyl to the digital sound of the CD or mp3. Some musicians insists on using old Moog synthesizers for authentic sound. And architects has substituted 3-D computer models for hand drawn sketches.
This could be interpreted as a revolt against the more or less complete computerization of everyday life. But, as Marshall McLuhan observed, new media does not so much make old media obsolete as they transform and reconfigures the way we perceive and use them. Not just does new technology change the social world around us, it changes our senses as well. And consequently: “When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.” (The Gutenberg Galaxy).
Going back to analogue should not be conceived as some kind of retro-movement. To use analogue media in a digital or post-analogue culture is not necessarily seeking refuge in the pre-digital. Despite the prefixes, the notions of pre-digital and post-analogue is not used to suggest any kind of chronology or temporal linearity. The analogue has been transformed, reconfigured or transfigured by the digital without necessarily becoming digital or post-analogue; and without by necessity remaining pre-digital.
We would like to suggest that it is a process of disjointed temporality and spatiality. Or, in the words of McLuhan: “What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes.” (Understanding Media). We call for papers that examines how this disjointed temporality and spatiality affects the aesthetic processes in art, film, literature, design, architecture, music and so on. This could be under the auspices of “the time is out of joint” (Shakespeare), “nostalgia for the present” (Fredric Jameson) or the “Ungleichzeitlichkeit des Gleichzeitigen” (Ernst Bloch) – or some other conception of time and space in contemporary aesthetics, be it theoretical, analytical or practical.
How does the use of analogue techniques, methods and media influence the aesthetics of art, design and architecture in a digital age? – in form as well as content. And vice versa: how does the use of digital tools and media affect aesthetic processes expressed in analogue material (ceramics, paper, concrete and so on)? To what extend has our senses been changed by digitalization and how is this expressed in the way we perceive and construe time and space? Are we really experiencing a new disjointed temporality and spatiality?
Literature
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1 – the Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2 – the Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Hatherly, Owen. Militant Modernism. London: O Books, 2009
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1. ed. London New York: Verso – Duke University Press, 1991.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media – the Extensions of Man. London: Routledge Classics, 2001.
Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria – Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, The MIT Press, 2009
Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies – Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Please mail your abstract to Kristine Samson (kristine@ready-made.dk) and Claus Krogholm (clauskrogholm@mail.dk), dead-line May 15th.
Registration for the Summer Session http://www.nsuweb.net/wb/sommar/?action=register, dead-line June 1st.
