FEDERATION HALL - MELBOURNE

27 - 29 NOVEMBER 2009

Third International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology

The next iteration of the Media Art History conference is Re:live which is to be held in Melbourne, Victoria in 2009. The event follows the success of the two previous Media Art History conferences, re:fresh (Banff 2005) and re:place (Berlin 2007). The conference series is supported by the Database of Virtual Art and Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology) whose International Advisory Committee will publicise the event and referee papers.

In developing the Re:live conference, we have established a national committee, to promote awareness and interest in the event across Australia. This committee is comprised of individuals who can drive forward these newer connections and reconnect with the ongoing themes established by the ‘re’ conferences. Australia provides an excellent geographic, geopolitical and geocultural space for hosting this conference. It connects regionally with both Asian and Pacific cultures and the ongoing exchange of media arts between, northern and southern hemispheres.

Over three stimulating days, historians, curators, media artists, creative arts practitioners and theorists at the forefront of their practice will explore the latest research and theories.

How do the media arts change? Through innovation, accident, discovery, mutation or crisis? How did contemporary media arts come to look and sound like they do? What options, potentialities and eccentricities in the history of media have been lost or overlooked or suppressed? What hopes have been realised and which dashed? What is the history of speculation on alternate histories, and how have they altered the course of media art history?

Keynote Presenters

Zhang Ga
Zhang Ga is a media art curator and professor of Media Art at Tsinghua University and at the School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design. He also holds appointments as Consulting Curator of Media Art at the National Art Museum of China, Senior Researcher at the Media and Design Lab of EPFL | Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in Switzerland, and Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab in the US. He directed and curated Synthetic Times: International New Media Art Exhibition, a Beijing Olympics Cultural Project organized by the National Art Museum of China in 2008, among his many curatorial projects. As one of the leading proponents of linking art and technology as a cultural practice in China, Zhang Ga works to identify the emergent Chinese artistic and cultural media landscape in relation to the global media art discourse

Douglas Kahn
Douglas Kahn, Professor at University of California, writes and speaks about the intersections of history, theory and contemporary practice in art, music, literature, media arts, cinema, sound, electromagnetism, science, technology and politics, from the late-19th Century to the present, with an emphasis on the traditions of the avant-garde, experimentalism, bohemian and subcultural activities.

Lisa Gitelman
This fall Lisa Gitelman begins an appointment as associate professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communications at New York University. A leading historian of the media, she is the author most recently of _Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture_ (MIT 2006). Her current projects include a book tentatively entitled _Making Knowledge with Paper_.

http://www.mediaarthistory.org/relive/relive_home.html