[ecrea] CfP: Media and Classics

Call for Papers:

Media and Classics

25-27 November 2016

Watershed, Bristol

Organized by the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical
Tradition, University of Bristol

‘The realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission
capabilities of a given culture,’ writes the German media theorist
Friedrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (originally
published in 1986). The emergence since the 1970s of electronic and
knowledge-based technologies, and more specifically of digital media,
has brought to the fore the close link that exists between media,
knowledge, and perception, a link generating both exhilaration and
anxiety. The centrality of media, however, to epistemological debates
around the ways in which knowledge is produced, stored, and
disseminated has a long history in Western thought. Under the banners
of media history, media archaeology, and cultural transmission,
important work has been undertaken in recent years on the history of
media since the Renaissance and on persistent tropes in media
discourse that make it possible to set current debates about digital
media in a broader historical and theoretical context. One of the most
complex and multifaceted case studies in the history of media in the
West yet to receive systematic examination has to do with the arts of
ancient Greece and Rome. What is the role of media (new and old,
material and spiritual, perceptible and imperceptible, transcendental
and immanent) in the formation and reproduction of Greco-Roman arts
and more broadly in what might be called the transmission of
‘classical’ culture?

Certain aspects of this topic have been touched on by media theorists
(on both sides of the Atlantic) in suggestive but highly selective and
often problematic ways. Other aspects have been approached by
classical scholars in more careful but historically and disciplinary
insular manners. Issues such as orality, literacy, performance,
memory, materiality, the senses, textual transmission, translation,
archival practices, the history of the book, and more recently
humanities computing are all implicated in the production,
transmission, and reception of the Greco-Roman literary, performing,
and plastic arts that we now call classical. However, there has been
no systematic attempt to date to shift the focus away from issues of
historical usage of media towards more theoretical concerns that can
link the media of the classical past with one another, with larger
processes of artistic production and reception, and with contemporary
debates around media, knowledge, and perception. As a result, the
processes of production and reception of the arts of Greece and Rome
are still perceived in ways that remain at once too narrow and too
broad: on the one hand they are dominated by the agency of long-dead
artists or ever-changing audiences; on the other hand they are
dominated by abstract ideas – the continuities of the Classical
Tradition, the discontinuities of Reception, the cosiness of
‘conversing’ with the past, or the rather nebulous qualities of
textuality and visuality.

Revisiting Martin Heidegger’s provocative claim that ‘the more
questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious
the essence of art becomes’ (in his seminal essay ‘The Question
Concerning Technology’ originally published in 1954), this conference
focuses attention on the cultural history of the material conditions
and technical and technological practices that give shape to artistic
creativity and make possible its transmission as ‘classical’ and as
‘culture.’ How are media conceptualized by artistic works and their
users in Greece and Rome? How do media shape the specificity,
convergence, and/or transference of different artistic forms and
contents? How do continuities and ruptures in artistic production and
transmission manifest themselves? How are artworks, artists, and
audiences networked through material and embodied structures of media
technology? How are ideas, concepts, and practices related to the
classical arts implicated in the history and culture of modern
theoretical debates around media and information technology? And how
are they implicated in broader discussions around the philosophical
apparatus of technology, culture, and biology as they are played out
against a critique of modernity?

Papers are invited on topics in areas such as the following:

           - cultural transmission as reproduction and/or as transformation
           - art as techne between historicity and metaphysics
           - fantasies of communication and horizons of incommunicability
           - technologies of writing systems and scripts
           - media as conduits, languages, and/or environments
           - media specificity and convergence
           - media and non-human agency
           - the body as a medium
           - humanism and anti-technological bias
           - Greece and Rome in debates in media theory
           - Greco-Roman arts in an age of media convergence, networks
and computation

30-minute papers are anticipated, but proposals are also welcome for
presentations outside the normal lecture format, including proposals
from artists and other creative practitioners; please provide details
of your plans in your application. Prospective presenters should send
a title, an abstract of 500 words, and a short biography by 1 April
2016 to:

Pantelis Michelakis
(P.Michelakis /at/ bris.ac.uk)



---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier and ECREA.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chaussée de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------