[Nettime-bold] The Archaeology of Multi-Media

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, we will launch the conference with a
performance/lecture Thursday night by the digital collective Mongrel (a
U.K.- and Jamaica-based artists group set up to explore issues of race,
technology and new-eugenics, and an agency to co-ordinate and set up other
new media projects so that those locked out of the mainstream can gain
strength without getting locked into power structures). 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 Archaeology of Multi-Media" brings together an international group of
scholars, artists, activists, and technologists, including:

Geoffrey Batchen (cultural criticism/history of photography; University of
New Mexico, U.S.A.)
James Der Derian (international relations; Brown University, U.S.A.)
Richard Dienst (cultural criticism/visual media; Rutgers University, U.S.A.)
Thomas Elsaesser (film/television/new media theory; University of
Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Wolfgang Ernst (history/classics/archaeology/museology/media studies;
University of Bochum, Germany)
Julia Flanders (Women Writers Project; Scholarly Technology Group, Brown
University, U.S.A.)
Graham Harwood (artist/programmer/co-ordinator; Mongrel, U.K.)
Ken Hillis (theories of communication technologies/virtual Geography/social
and political identities; University of North Carolina, U.S.A.)
Mervin Jarman (artist/programmer/co-ordinator; Mongrel, Jamaica)
Thomas Keenan (human rights/literary theory/media studies; Bard College,
U.S.A.)
Lev Manovich (artist, theorist and critic of new media; University of
California, San Diego, U.S.A.)
Tara McPherson (gender and critical studies/television/new media/popular
culture; University of Southern California, U.S.A.)
Thomas Levin (media and cultural history and theory; Princeton University,
U.S.A.)
Geert Lovink (media theorist and activist; Adilkno + De Waag + many others,
Netherlands)
Nick Mirzeoff (visual culture/art history; SUNY Stony Brook, U.S.A.)
Lisa Nakamura (postcolonial studies/critical theory; Sonoma State, U.S.A.)
Renata Salecl (sociology, criminology, and philosophy; University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Cornelia Vismann (rhetoric and media techniques of law; European University
Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder))

This conference, supported by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Research in
Culture and Media Studies
and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, 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.