The Archaeology of Multi-Media
A Conference at Brown University (Providence RI, U.S.A.)
Thursday-Saturday, November 2-4, 2000 http://www.modcult.brown.edu/amm
For two-and-a-half days, participants in the conference will engage and
interrogate rhetoric about electronic media that describes them as
fundamentally new, irrevocably transformative and virtually unstoppable.
Refusing to rely on descriptions such as "new" and
"digital" (for what medium has not at one time been new, or is
not now produced digitally?), the conference will highlight mixed-media
art and scholarship. It will seek some alternative interpretations and
understandings of the singularity of electronic content, context, form,
and audience, as well as another map of the ways in which media have
always been multiple. Archaeology of Multi-Media seeks to integrate
historical scholarship and emerging modes of media theory, and to link
the study of multimedia with existing work on 'traditional' media, as it
opens some emergent spaces of mixture and multiplicity in present
research and action.
In order to do this, the digital collective Mongrel--a UK and Jamaica
based artists group set up to explore issues of race, technology and
new-eugenics--will launch the conference with a performance/lecture
Thursday night. This event will be followed on Friday and Saturday by
eight ninety-minute panels, as well as student mixed-media displays,
covering issues like: film, television and video, and print and or as
electronic media; language and systems; conflict media; identity and
difference; and social movements.
"The Archeology of Multi-Media" brings together an
international group of scholars, artists, activists, and technologists,
including:
Geoffrey Batchen, University of New Mexico
James Der Derian, Brown University
Richard Dienst, Rutgers University
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wolfgang Ernst, University of Bochum, Germany
Julia Flanders, STG Brown
Ken Hillis, University of North Carolina
Thomas Keenan, Bard College
Thomas Levin, Princeton University
Geert Lovink, Nettime, Netherlands
Lev Manovich, University of California, San Diego
Tara McPherson, University of Southern California
Nick Mirzeoff, SUNY Stony Brook
Lisa Nakamura, Sonoma State
Renata Salecl, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Cornelia Vismann, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)
This conference, supported by the Malcom S. Forbes Center and the
Pembroke Center, and organized by the Department of Modern Culture and
Media at Brown University, is free and open to the public but
registration is required. Please register either on the web or by
emailing amm@brown.edu. For more information, please visit the
website at
http://www.modcult.brown.edu/amm.