September 08, 2005
International Conference
Technologies of Memory
May 19-20, 2006, Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). The conference Technologies of Memory in the Arts focuses on art as a cultural and technological practice to process and construct the past in the present. Central questions to this conference are: How do art and artistic practices function as technologies of memory? How are cultural artefacts implicated in complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesia?
As a shared artistic and social practice, cultural memory links the present to the past. In doing so, cultural memory has strong ethical and political aspects. The arts are continuously engaged in non-linear processes of remembering and forgetting, characterised by repetition, rearrangement, revision, and rejection. In artistic representations new memories are thus constantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed by narrative strategies, visual and aural styles, intertextuality and intermediality, representations of time and space, and rituals of remembrance. These complex processes of representation are what we understand by the term 'technologies of memory'.
The contemporary fascination with history and memory is accompanied by developments in media technology that have simultaneously a petrifying and a virtualising effect. Both individual and cultural memory are increasingly mediated by modern technologies, which means that memories are not only recorded and recollected by media, but are also shaped and produced by them. The digital media, in particular, allow for new ways of storing, retrieving and archiving personal and collective memories, as well as cultural artefacts.
The conference Technologies of Memory in the Arts specifically addresses the material construction of cultural memory. It aims to explore procedures of memory in both traditional and new media as well as to investigate the role of digitalisation of art and culture in relation to memory. Generally, its focus is on the materiality of representation and on the relation between the medium and the construction of cultural memory.
Keynote speakers (confirmed):
- Marita Sturken (University of Southern California)
- Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
We are especially interested in panel and paper proposals on the following topics:
- Mediated memories
- Narrative strategies
- Intertextuality / intermediality
- Music as memory work
- Urban space and spatial dimensions
- Tourism and heritage
- Musical subcultures as memory space
- Representations of memory in the arts
- Amnesia and anamnesia
- Icons of the recent past
- Rituals of remembrance
- Rituals, music and the shape of memory
- Nostalgia and pastiche
- Retro styles as forms of cultural memory
- Rewritings of the classics
- Digitalisation of archives
- Music/sound recordings and the technology of memory
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2005.
More information and submission:
http://www.ru.nl/comparativearts/research/technologies_of/
Posted by jo at September 8, 2005 03:11 PM
