RE: TRACE - the 7^th International conference on the histories of media art, science and technology will be hosted by the department for image science and held at Danube University Krems, Göttweig Abbey and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. More than a decade after the first conference founded the field now recognized worldwide as a significant historical inquiry at the intersection of art, science, and technology, media art histories is now firmly established as a dynamic area of study guided by changing media and research priorities, drawing a growing community of scholars, artists and artist-researchers.

Keynote Speakers

• Martin KEMP (em. professor Oxford University, British Academy, UK)
• Wendy Hui CHUN (Brown University, USA)
• Ryszard W. KLUSZCZYNSKI (University Lodz, PL)
• Sarah KENDERDINE (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, CH)
• Morten SøNDERGAARD (Aalborg University, DK)

About Re:Trace

The 7^th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology titled RE:TRACE focuses on an evaluation of the status of the meta-discipline MediaArtHistories today.

More than a decade after the first conference founded the field now recognized worldwide as a significant historical inquiry at the intersection of art, science, and technology, Media Art Histories is now firmly established as a dynamic area of study guided by changing media and research priorities, drawing a growing community of scholars, artists and artist-researchers.

Immersed in both contemporary and historiographical aspects of the digital world, we explore the most immediate socio-cultural questions of our time: from body futures, information society, and media (r)evolutions, to environmental interference, financial virtualization, and surveillance. And we do so through a fractal lens of inter- and trans-disciplinarity, bridging art history, media studies, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and beyond. MediaArtHistories is a field whose theory, methods, and objects of study interweave with and overlay other disciplines.

Programme

Day 1, 23.11.2017 

• 08:30 Registration
• 09:00 Official Opening Welcome by Landeshauptfrau Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Rektor Friedrich Faulhammer and Conference Chairs Oliver Grau (Danube U) and Inge Hinterwaldner (HU Berlin)
• 09:20 Keynote Ryszard KLUSZCZYŃSKI (University of Łodz, PL): Monument as Archive: artistic strategies from anti- to meta-memorial

(Introduction by Inge Hinterwaldner)

10:20 Coffee Break

Stream Media Art & Politics

Audimax, Danube University Stream Sound

Cinema Kesselhaus, Danube University Campus Stream Early New Media

Room 2.2, Main Building, Danube University

10:45 Session: Cybernetics, computing and the question of representation in art

Chair: Giselle BEIGUELMAN

• Andres BURBANO (CO): The MONIAC and the Arts
• Kevin HAMILTON (US): Beyond Visualization: Genealogies of Unmapped Complexity in Media Art and Technology
• Gerald NESTLER (AT): tba

Session: Early experimental strategies in the image-sound-complex

Chair: Wendy COONES

• Jungmin LEE (US): Scroll as Virtual Media: Kinetic Abstraction and Projection circa 1920
• Stefanie BRÄUER (CH): Electronic Oscillography in Early 1950s Experimental Film
• Ashley SCARLETT/Martin ZEILINGER(CA): Art, Technology and Affordance
• Soojung YI (KR): When 'new media art' became the solution to endow cultural identity to its community? The history of new media art in South Korea since 1980s

Session: Generative Art

Chair: Ksenia FEDOROVA

• Frieder NAKE (DE): Georg Nees & Harold Cohen. Retracing Origins
• Caroline MENEZES (UK): From Painting to Coding: The Art of Harold Cohen
• Sjouke van der MEULEN (NL):tba
• Robin OPPENHEIMER (US): You have been processed! Exploring Early Artists' & Engineers' Collaborations with Video Processing Machines

12:15 Lunch Break & Poster Session of Media Art & Digital Humanities projects and research tools in the hall

13:45 Session: Politics - Ambitious goals with tactical media

Chair: Katharina GSÖLLPOINTNER

• Dmitry GALKIN (RU): Art, Science and Technology in Russia: current affairs and ambitions for the future (from institutional and artistic perspectives)
• Rania GAFAAR (DE): Crisis as Critical Practice in the MENA
• Chandrika ACHARYA (IN): Mediating Resistance: Indian New Media Art Session: Sound Art

Chair: Ana PERAICA

• Biljana LEKOVIĆ (RS): History/Practices of Sound Art in Serbia
• Michelle LEWIS-KING (UK): Pulse Project: Listening Across Disciplines and Cultures
• Joo Yun LEE (US): Speculative-sensible Experience in Ryoji Ikeda’s Audiovisual Installation and Performance Inside and Outside of the White Cube           Session: From Trans-Local to Telematic

Chair: Jon CATES

• Rod BANTJES (CA): Governing Publics: the Politics of Optical media in 18th-century England and America
• Patrick LICHTY (AE): the world, Another 24 Hours: Practice-Based Research and the works of Robert Adrian X & Bill Bartlett
• Paul SERMON/Claire MCANDREW (UK): 3x4: a telematics/architectural hypersurface
• Polonia TRATNIK (SI): Media art and Politics: The Question of Tomorrow
• Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda SEPÚLVEDA (CA): Towards an alternative history of Electronic Music: Latin American Women Composers, 1888-1980
• Joanna GRIFFIN (IN): Creative Encounters and Subaltern Aesthetic in the Early Years of the Indian Space Program

15:15 Coffee Break

15:45 Session: Politics - Ecology, politics, and aesthetics I

Chair: Andres BURBANO

• Aaron BURTON (AU): Ecological intimacy and unmanned photography: drones, GoPros, and satellites
• Jens HAUSER (DK): Toward Greenness Studies: Materials – Metaphors – Media – Misunderstandings
• Yvonne VOLKART (CH): Re-Tracing Aesthetic Strategies in Times of Electronic Waste
• Viola RÜHSE (AT): Facebook's symbolic headquarter MPK20 by Frank Gehry

Session: Modulating sensory perception with media cross-over

Chair: Sjouke van der MEULEN

• Katharina GSÖLLPOINTNER (AT): Digital Kinesthesia. Kinesthetic modes of media aesthetics in digital art
• Chris SALTER (CA): Sensed Selves: The (expanded) Sensorium in Media Art History
• Nina SOSNA (PT)/Ksenia FEDOROVA (RU): Connective tissues in media interferences
• Aura BALANESCU (RO): Media Art: Trans-Perception, Trans-Repräsentation, Trans-Consciousness

Session: Soft and Fluid Media

Chair: Katja KWASTEK

• Jonas JØRGENSEN (DK): From Soft Sculpture to Soft Robotics: Retracing a Physical Aesthetics of Bio-Morphic Softness
• Hava ALDOUBY (IL): Shifting Sands: Sand as Medium in Israeli New Media Art
• Laura BELOFF (DK): Observing Evolution and Techno-Organic Practices – in Art and Design
• Falk HEINRICH (DK): Art and Technology as Research: Episteme and Techne Fluidity

17:15  Keynote Morten SØNDERGAARD (Aalborg University, DK): Archive Agencies. Tracing the Implied Producers of Media Art Collections

(Introduction tba)

18:30 Opening Drinks and exhibition tour at Kunsthalle Krems Welcome by Director Florian Steininger

Ceremony: MediaArtHistories International Award to Werner Nekes (posthumous), Laudatio by Chair of Award Committee Oliver Grau

Day 2, 24.11.2017 (Göttweig Abbey)

• 09:30 Transfer from Danube University to Göttweig Abbey
• 09:30 Welcome to Göttweig Abbey by Abt Columban Luser (angefragt)
• 09:45 Keynote Wendy Hui Kyong CHUN (Brown University, US): Approximate Repetitions: Latent Big Data

(Introduction by Inge Hinterwaldner)

10:45 Coffee Break

Stream Politics

Brunnensaal, Göttweig Abbey Stream Media Art Futures/Histories

Sommerrefektorium, Göttweig Abbey Stream Unearthing beginnings in new media art

Room “Kremstal”, Göttweig Abbey

11:15 Session: Politics: Political and aesthetic impacts of automated classifications

Chair: Morten SØNDERGAARD

• Maciej OŻÓG (PL): Tearing down the biometric cage: deconstructing biometric surveillance through art
• Jennifer GRADECKI (US)/Derek CURRY (US): Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency: Prototyping Counterveillance
• Devon SCHILLER (AT): The physiognomic (un)genre: Challenges of Automated Facial Expression Analysis-Based Media Art to both the Art and Science of Face
• Mehul BHATT (DE): THE SHAPE OF THE MOVING IMAGE: Perspectives from Spatial Cognition and Artificial Intelligence

Session: Artistic and curatorial narratives of memory

Chair: tba

• Darko FRITZ (HR): Interdisciplinary Multimedia at the 3rd International Artists Meetings in Vela Luka 1972
• José R. ALCALÁ (ES)/Beatriz ESCRIBANO BELMAR (ES): Interactive multimedia creations at the International Museum of Electrographic Artworks in Cuenca (Spain), 1994-2006. Pioneer productions for the construction of hypermedia narratives
• Miklós PETERNÁK (HU): Photo/Model - The Memories of Forgetting
• Leonardo IMPETT (CH): Robot Aesthetics and Cultural Imperialism: the Double Hermeneutic of Computational Photography

Session: Media Archeological studies

Chair: Andres BURBANO

• Roberta BUIANI (CA): Re-appropriating the messiness of things: a more-than-human approach to curating in art and science
• Victor FLORES (PT): Carlos Relvas (1838-1894): The Intriguing Research of his Stereo Archive
• Beatriz ESCRIBANO BELMAR (ES)/José R. ALCALÁ (ES): The artistic contribution of the electrographic practices in the archeology of electronic art
• Adam LAUDER (CA): Science/Fiction: Canadian Information Art in the 1970s

12:45 Lunch Break, optionally a guided tour through the Abbey

14:15 Session: Internet infrastructure under scrutiny

Chair: Ksenia FEDOROVA

• David GAUTHIER (NL)/Marc TUTERS (NL): Mailing lists are dead, long live mailing lists! – periodising discourses, debates, and infrastructures of nettime, empire, spectre, and crumb
• Natalia FEDOROVA (RU): Internet of Names. Poetics of Infrastructure
• Martín NADAL (ES)/César ESCUDERO ANDALUZ (ES): Critical mining, Blockchain and Bitcoin in contemporary art
• Andre MINTZ (BR): After Internet? F.A.T. Lab's farewell and reconsiderations of the post-internet trope in art 
  

Session: Histories of media technology

Chair: José R. ALCALÁ

• Katja KWASTEK (NL): 'fictitious future pasts'? on artists reflecting on the digitality of the present by imagining the remnants of today's technology in future times
• Grant BOLLMER (US): Gaming Formalisms and the Aesthetics of Empathy
  
• Ozgun Eylul ISCEN (US): Alternative Histories of New Media: Telecommunication Technologies and Media Arts in the Middle East
• Randall PACKER (SG): Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communication Revolution 

Session: Retracing media art and its precursors in Latin America

 Chair: Andreas BROECKMANN

• José-Carlos MARÍATEGUI (PE)/ Elisa ARCA (PE): Teresa Burga: a pioneer multimedia and information artist
• Reynaldo THOMPSON (MX): Digital art in Latin America
• Erandy VERGARA-VARGAS (CA): Re-Tracing Methods: Rethinking Media Art Histories and Relations between the North and the Global South
• Carmen Gil VROLIJK (CO): A genealogy of art and technology in Colombia: 1976-2016

15:45 Coffee Break

16:15 Session DH: Preservation strategies I: Performing and rethinking materiality

Chair: tba

• Jo Ana MORFIN (MX): Restored Behavior: Performing Materiality
• Laura LEUZZI (UK): Re-enacting early video art as a research tool for media art histories
• Margrét Elísabet OLAFSDÓTTIR (IS): The Vasulka Chamber and Media Art in Iceland
• Denisa KERA (US)/Cynthia Selin (US): Parlor of Futures: Tarot cards, Futures Techniques and Octave Obdurant's 'Cosmographic Comparator'

Session: Curation and art production in crowdsourced and networked situations

Chair: Ryszard KLUSZCZYŃSKI

• Zizi LI (US): theorizing Instagram: Ontology, Epistemology, and Aesthetics
• Mark NUNES (US): The Crowdsourced Archive: Mobile Media, Photography, and the Local(ized) Frame
• Kanokwan TRAKULYINGCHAROEN (AT): Mediascapes in 'Cities on the Move in Bangkok' (1999)

Session: net.art revisited

Chair: Janina HOTH

• Raivo KELOMEES (EE): From Net Art to Post-Internet Art: The Cyclical Nature of Art Movements
• Rasa SMITE (LV) /Raitis SMITS (LV): Fields – Manifesting the Transformative Potential of Arts in the Age of Post-Media
• Filipe PAIS (FR): From bits to paper: A short history of the aesthetics of rematerialization
• Jon CATES (US): whois LaTurbo Avedon, Netochka Nezvanova and/or Rrose Sélavy?

18:00  Transfer to Krems

Day 3, 25.11.2017 (ÖAW)

• 09:30 Transfer from Danube University to the Academy of Sciences Vienna (ÖAW)
• 09:45 Welcome ÖAW by Anton Zeilinger (President ÖAW; angefragt), Eveline Wandl-Vogt and Oliver Grau
• 10:00 “DARIAH” Keynote Sarah KENDERDINE (EPFL, CH): Postdigital Pasts

(Introduction tba)

11:00 Coffee Break

Stream Digital Arts, Archives and Museums

Festsaal, Academy of Sciences Stream Image

Sitzungssaal, Academy of Sciences Stream

Johannessaal, Academy of Sciences

11:30 Dariah Connectivity Part I: Collection - Archiving - Preservation

Chair: Eveline WANDL-VOGT

• Francesca FRANCO (IT): Past Present Future of curatorial practices and media art history
• Andreas BROECKMANN (DE): Re-Visiting Les Immatériaux
• Giselle BEIGUELMAN (BR): Museums of the Unfinished to Ephemeral Memories: notes on net art conservation
• Janina HOTH (AT): Theorizing methods of documentation in the Archive of Digital Art
• Annet DEKKER (NL): Between light and dark archiving

Session: Aesthetics I - Theories of the post-digital image

Chair: Inge Hinterwaldner

• Ingrid HOELZL (HK): Postimage: On the Future Evolution of the image and its Theory
• Ana NACHER (PL): The post-digital imagery as relational object
• Yael Eylat VAN-ESSEN (IL): From the Digital to the Post-Digital – the Photographic Image
• Susanne Østby SÆTHER (NO): Pink Skies and Green Screens: Readymade Colors and Chroma Keyed Moods in Video Art Since 2010           Session: Cultural roots of media art practices

Chair: Carl AIGNER

• Ana PERAICA (HR): Post-digital paradigm shift: from Narcissus to Perseus
• Bahar AKGÜN (TK)/Mine ÖZKAR (TR): Gaze and Geometry: comparing two languages of vision from Medieval Eastern and Modern Western visual compositions
• Alberto SEMELER (BR): Cybercontemporary art: mutations and digital contagion
• Manuelle FREIRE (CA): Training in the complex adaptive systems of media art: A critique of the mythologies of art and interdisciplinary learning in higher education

13:00 Lunch Break & Poster Session of Digital Humanities projects and research tools in the hall

14:30 Dariah Connectivity Part II: Preservation strategies II: Dynamic archiving

Chair: tba

• George LEGRADY (US): Projects in Visualizing Data 1992-2017
• Harald KRÄMER (HK): Archiving Ephemeral Knowledge - Hong Kong Martial Arts as a Documentation Strategy for Intangible Cultural Heritage
• Ann-Marie DUGUET (FR): tba

Session: Aesthetics II - New media art theory mashup

Chair: Inge Hinterwaldner

• Jacob WAMBERG (DK): Return of operativity: Prolegomena to a grand narrative of media in deep time
• Valentino CATRICALÀ (IT): The social impact of Media Art
• Steve DIXON (UK): Understanding Media Art as Cybernetic-Existentialism
• Pau ALSINA (ES): Ethico-onto-epistemologies of Media Art: A case study of the 'Protocol for Interdisciplinary Research' project 

Session: Recent tendencies in computer-aided preserving and presenting

Chair: Jon CATES

• Richard RINEHART (US): Code-Switching
• Goki MIYAKITA (JP)/Keiko OKAWA (JP): Design of Narrative Book Collection: Redesigning Pre-Modern Japanese Books in the Digital Age
• Maria Teresa CRUZ (PT): Curating in the Age of Artistic Ubiquity and of Visualizing Techniques

16:00 Coffee Break

16:30 Dariah Connectivity Roundtable: Six decades of Digital Arts & museums - a new infrastructure

Discussants for Roundtable tba Session: Reframing social artistic initiatives since the 1960s

Chair: Valentino CATRICALA

• Stephen JONES (AU): Community Activist Video and the origins of Video Art
• Kirk WOOLFORD (UK): CyberSM, cybersex and 25 years of VR
• Catherine BERNARD (US): Electronic Disturbance Theater, Floating Point Unit, Fakeshop

Session: Ecology, Politics, Aesthetics II

Chair: tba

• Clara Boj TOVAR/Diego DIAZ (ES): Hybrid ecologies on the anthropocene: Mar Menor Research
• Birgit BACHLER (NZ): Live streams. Introducing the narratives of local waters to Aotearoa/New Zealand media art
• Sara GARZON (US): Amaru Cholango in How to Poeticize Technology
• Nathalia LAVIGNE (BR): Art on Instagram: Imaginary museums, counter-collections and moving images

18:00 Closing Remarks & Announcement of the next venue (2019)

19:00 Closing Keynote Martin KEMP (Oxford University, UK): Computerising Leonardo: a visual dialogue from 1988 to now

(Introduction by Oliver Grau)

19:30 Conference Finissage

Poster Session of Media Art & Digital Humanities projects and research tools (Nov 23 & 25)

1.            Steyn BERGS (NL): Streaming Liquidity Inc.: Singularization and Commodification of the Digital Artwork

2.            Franziska BUTZE-RIOS (AT): An Example of Conscientious Handling of Time-Based Media Artwork

3.            Stephanie DeBOER (US): On Adjacent Infrastructural Tactics for Urban Screens (Shanghai version)

4.            Penesta DIKA (XK): Reflections of contemporary society in media art: The visitor as a leading actor in artworks

5.            Valerie FELIX (CH): The Trace in Digital Interactive work. A rethinking between identification and “technique of the self”

6.            Manuelle FREIRE (CA): La Biennale internationale de l'art numérique de Montréal (BIAN) - AUTOMATA

7.            Oliver GRAU, Devon SCHILLER, Janina HOTH (Lab for Digital Humanities, AT): The Media Art History Research Thesaurus

8.            Bilge HASEDMIR (TR): Digging the (new) media art scene of İstanbul: Towards Media Art Historical Re-discovery

9.            David KADISH (DK): On Scale and Fields: Artistic Practice and Agricultural Machines

10.          Romi MIKULINSKY (IL): Stargazing and the "Data Sublime"

11.          Maria MIRE (PT): Technical phantasmagorias: the phantom-effect of moving images

12.          Anna ORRGHEN (SE): The Ephemerality of Digital Monuments: Swedish Public Art at the Turn of the Millennium, the case of “Tidsdokumentet”

13.          Chiara PASSA (IT): From the series Live Architectures: “Dimensioning”.

14.          Treva PULLEN (CA): BioCare: Feminist Labs and the Aesthetics of Care

15.          Julian STADON (UK)/Boris Debackere (NL): Yima: A Proposition for Archiving Cultural Heritage Through Objects Rather Than Human Subjectivity

16.          Iván TERCEROS (EC): Coding from the Latin American ancestral indigenous knowledge

17.          Tomohiro UESHIBA (JP): A plan for reproduction of stage equipments of Dumb type’s performance “pH”

18.          Karin de WILD (UK): The Social Lives Of Online Art

19.          Joel ZIKA (AU): Horror and the history of immersive media art

20.          Hanna Brinkmann (AT): tba

21.          Diego Milado (ES): tba

Tickets and more info: www.mediaarthistory.org/retrace