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. The 2012-2013 edition 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?

Particularly in the post WWII period, 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. The concept of new media seems to promise a mass media address, yet artists have often emphasized the limits of circulation—for instance, in closed-circuit television, or in zines that were produced via Xerox processes and yet distributed to small networks. Such a dialectical relation escapes media theory’s emphasis on mass distribution and gestures instead toward sites of friction between the imaginative and material aspects of new media, which the discipline of art history may be particularly well-equipped to explore.

Furthermore, the formation and performance of art history has been contingent upon pivotal introductions of reproductive media, from the double-slide lecture to the publication of photographs in books, from the use of facsimiles in the classroom to broadcasts of “art on television.” In turning with fresh eyes to the idea of new media, we consider art history’s rhetorics of description and display. How might we effectively attend to the aesthetic and pedagogical aspects of new media in the wake of communications theory and concepts such as interactivity?

Just as recent scholarship has addressed the nuances of “pre-modern” and modern notions of mediality—including forms of mechanical reproducibility and audiovisual displays emergent in the Middle Ages—so might we aim to reframe more contemporary art historical categories of “lateness” such as the post-medium condition.

We are especially interested in papers that diverge from the well-known chronologies of Euro-American technological developments.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

– the performance and circulation of art history through facsimiles,  photographs, slide projections
– responses and counter-responses to new media technologies within art  criticism, critical theory, and film theory
– historical modes of mechanical reproduction, such as imprinting  coins, technologies of the book, and seals
– transfers and transformations among media
– media as reference for other media
– the materiality of new media, and material processes
– new media and abstraction
– painting after the advent of network theory
– the aesthetics of television
– queer aesthetics and new media
– analog and digital in art and art history
– historiographies of “video art,” including the role of projection
– the wider implications of artists’ practices in Xerox, zines, artists’ books, flip books, and holograms
– the dialectics of art transmitted through media and art as media
– new media’s relevance for reframing art historical cycles and geographies of innovation

Submissions:

Papers must follow The Chicago Manual of Style and should not exceed 5.000 words. Each submission should include an abstract of approximately 500 words. Both Word documents and PDFs are acceptable.

All contributors should include their name, address, telephone number, and email address. Authors are responsible for securing image reproduction rights and associated fees. Please send submissions to the graduate student editor Solveig Nelson at UChicagoArtJournal@gmail.com by December 17, 2012, 5 p.m.

Reference / Quellennachweis: CFP: Historiographies of New Media (Chicago Art Journal). In: H-ArtHist, Nov 5, 2012. <http://arthist.net/archive/4152>.