College Art Association call - 2009

http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/CallforParticipation2009.pdf
Deadline 5/9/08
Different topics - see whole call


The "Tangiality" of Digital Media
Paul Catanese, San Francisco State University, paulc@sfsu.edu; and
Joan Truckenbrod, School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
jtruckenbrod@saic.edu
With digital media, there is a radical shift in our sensory perceptions
as they evolve to absorb, incorporate, and adopt the immateriality
of the virtual. Consequently, materials of digital media are
multimodal; the virtuality of the screen erupts as intervention with
the materiality of paper, video projection, and objects or space in
installation. Inherent in this media is a reexamination of the idea
of material, as artworks are sited on the threshold of tangible and
intangible materials. Artists are invited to discuss how they
embrace hybrid methodologies in their studio practice. Papers
may address: Where are materials situated? Is material considered
substance, engagement, or embodiment? How does material
as code intersect with material as physical? How has this shift
precipitated a hybrid of virtual coordinates, physical locations,
and social engagement? How does digital artwork manifest as
choreography, visual artifact, and substance?

From Eye to Ear and Back Again: The Intersection of
Visual Art and Modern Musical Composition
Carey Lovelace, independent critic, 105 Duane St., #40E, New York, NY
10007
At the turn of the twentieth century, painters such as Wassily
Kandinsky turned to contemporary music to provide models for
new forms of abstraction. Conversely, the avant-garde composer
John Cage, with his aleatoric compositional method, had
a profound effect on visual artists such as Robert
Rauschenberg and Allan Kaprow, ushering chance into artmaking.
Meanwhile, several noteworthy musicians have created
"graphic scores," visualizations of sound that are themselves
works of art. And artists such as Christian Marclay use
themes of sound in their works. This panel, open to scholars
and artists alike, invites papers exploring areas or examining
contributions of specific practitioners within the fascinating
cross-fertilization between art and the fringes of advanced
classical music, with an emphasis on overview.

The Ecological Imagination: From Land Art to Bioart
Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara, Dept. of English,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
This session considers the relations between art and ecology,
from land art to recent work in bioart, including transgenic art and
artificial life. Scholars of contemporary and new-media art are
invited to find connections among unframed art practices as
seemingly diverse as those of Robert Smithson and Eduardo Kac.
Also invited are panelists who can think about relations between
contemporary ecological art practices and discourses on
bioethics and biopolitics. What imaginaries of "life" are produced
by the art practices of Karl Sims, the Critical Art Ensemble, and
others? How might we understand artworks that invite our empathetic
identification with artificial creatures? From earthworks to
geographic-information systems, how have our notions of visualizing
landscapes been altered? What aesthetic and political commitments
can we trace in visualizations of climate and other environmental
data? Papers might focus on any art practice or movement
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Land Use in Contemporary Art
Kirsten Swenson, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Art Dept.,
4505 Maryland Pkwy., Las Vegas, NV 89154-5002
This panel explores themes of land use in art since the 1990s.
Interventions, data collection, mappings, imagined geographies,
and temporary and permanent modifications of the landscape by
artists and collectives have involved roles and strategies that are
continuous with practices of scientific investigation, policymaking,
habitation, tourism, and land stewardship. The Center for Land
Use Interpretation, Andrea Zittel's High Desert Test Sites, and the
work of Francis Alÿs and Cai Guo-Qiang are but a few examples
of artists or collectives who have realized new conceptions of land
art or represent examples of contemporary art engaged with
social aspects of land use. Are now-historical categories of land
and environmental art, associated with earthworks, nonsites, and
environmental actions produced from the 1960s through the
1980s, conceptually relevant to new land-based practices? How
might epic, ongoing projects such as Michael Heizer's City and
James Turrell's Roden Crater be situated against more recent
artistic strategies and among social and historical shifts in the
American West? Papers critically analyzing the practice of artists
or collectives that exemplify new approaches to land art or are
engaged with contemporary discourse on land use are welcome.