Networked Images. Artistic Practices Before and After the Internet

Workshop, October 28-29, 2016
Veranstaltungsort: eikones Forum, eikones NFS Bildkritik, Rheinsprung 11, CH-4051 Basel

Organised by Eva Ehninger, Basel University / Antje Krause-Wahl, Gutenberg University, Mainz

The current debate about artistic practices involving the internet revolves around the question whether or not the inevitable technological immanence of these projects still allows for a critical perspective. David Joselit maintains that contemporary positions which are in digital conjunction with the material they use are completely integrated into the networks of today’s communication cycles (2012). Steven Shaviro diagnoses an accelerationist aesthetic, which positively copies economic strategies of accumulation (2013). Similarly, Kerstin Stakemeier accuses the so-called Post-Internet Art of an urge to become indistinguishable, which may be recognized in its “mimicry” of digital capitalism (2015). The fundamental problem seems to be that artistic data production is integrated in the online and market circulation of contemporary culture without leaving any trace. According to the authors, art, by adopting the binary codes of digital culture, is bound to lose its critical potential.
In order to go beyond this simplifying understanding of critique, our workshop will consider a longer period of artistic activity in its interaction with mass media and communication technology. Artistic practices before and after the internet are confronted with the ideal to be integrated into their contemporary media context while at the same time remaining visible and relevant as art. The decision for the digital medium needs to be related to a history of critical engagement with the respective, historically specific “new media”.

Program

Friday, October 28, 2016

2.00: Introduction
Eva Ehninger, University of Basel/ Antje Krause-Wahl, Gutenberg University, Mainz

2.30-3.15: Painting in the Digital Age: Critical Possibilities
Aline Guillermet, University of Cambridge

3.15-4.00: Automatisms: Serial Photography between Apparatus and Net
Birk Weiberg, Zurich University of the Arts

break

4.30-5.15: Gesture, Glitch, and Discourse: Techniques of Remontage “Against the Digital”
Toni Hildebrandt, University of Bern/Istituto Svizzero, Rome

5.15-6.00: Lying in the Gallery
Pamela M. Lee, Stanford University

Apéro

Saturday, October 29, 2016

9.30-10.15: Image Accumulations. The Loss of Referentiality and the Digital Apriori
Ursula Frohne, University of Münster

10.15-11.00: Fluxus Against New Media
Natilee Harren, University of Houston

break

11.30-12.15: Layering, Annotating, Connecting - Networked Images in Locative Media Arts
Annette Urban, Ruhr University, Bochum

lunch break

1.45-2.30: Rites of Density: Aaron Flint Jamison
Simon Baier, University of Vienna

2.30-3.15: Juliana Huxtable’s Networked Body
Antje Krause-Wahl, Gutenberg University, Mainz

break

3.45-4.30: R-U-In?S: Survival, Peer-networks and Niche Evolution in Art After the Internet
Cadence Kinsey, University College London