Click here to view images from the 2006 symposium!
Click here to view the 2008 call for papers.
Friday, April 14 , 1-5 p.m.
Orleans Hall, 201 Barnard St., Savannah, Ga.
The New Renaissance - An Interactive Paradigm
The Savannah College of Art and Design Art History Symposium will explore an idea introduced by Don Foresta during a guest lecture at SCAD in 2005. He suggested that we are entering a second renaissance, a rebirth of an interdisciplinary praxis that enables integrated forms of research and knowledge production. This new renaissance grows out of the dramatic technological and cultural changes brought about during the late 19th and 20th centuries and amplified into a more integrated synthesis in art and design praxis as we enter the 21st century. Such a new renaissance is producing a cultural reality in which the collection and communication of information increasingly relies on interactivity within such a paradigm.
This symposium will explore how digital forms of expression and artistic practice are also defining a new set of aesthetic values. Overall, our hope is that a public dialogue concerning these emerging issues and the artistic practices they have engendered will reveal the ways in which artists, designers and the public engage with the world around them using emerging technologies and interactive modalities. SCAD students will have a rare opportunity to consider these issues and shifting values, and to take part in a dialogue within the context of a broad theoretical and historical framework grounded in the presentations of a distinguished panel of research scholars. Afterall, they will participate in the making of such a new renaissance.
The Interactive Network and The New Renaissance
For more than a century, art and science have defined a new space for Western society, a space containing the organizational schema of our universe, replacing the clockwork operation of the mechanical universe. It is a visual space, a communication space, an organizational space, a philosophical space, a psychological space, and the space of our imagination where reality and our interaction with it are seen and defined. This space has been proposed by artists, defined by science and made habitable by artists again as it is integrated into our cultural consciousness. The process - a new renaissance in the profoundness of its rupture with the past in how we understand and represent reality - is not complete. Completion will not be for another 50 years, but we have become conscious of it and are, therefore, capable of accelerating and directing it toward new ways of seeing and knowing.
The space will function in time not as a fixed static space, but as one which is partly defined by its evolution. It will be interactive, containing multiple points of view - the observer as actor, actor as observer. Our cultural reality will be found in the collection and communication of those several points of view. The space-time fractal geometry of this space is becoming clearer and will eventually replace the Euclidean geometry of the first renaissance in our imagination.
Every mode of communication has at one of its extremes a form of expression we call art. Art, being the densest form of communication, is often the supreme test of any means of communication. Each work of art contains the entire worldview of the artist and the dimensions necessary to fulfill that need. Art is the means by which we test a communication system, and by doing so, the reality it attempts to portray.
The flux of civilization produces the ideas that produce the tools for the realization of the ideas. In the use of those tools we can see the organizational patterns that are becoming the institutional expression of our future society. The interactive network is now the metaphor of our civilization and its geometry, the geometry of our imagination - the paradigm of the new renaissance.
Speakers
Download the 2006 Art History Symposium brochure, which includes the abstracts and bios of this year's speakers.
Webcast
Click here to view a recording of the 2006 symposium webcast.
Symposium co-chairs
Organizing committee
Acknowledgements
This symposium was made possible with the support of the School of Liberal Arts and the office of the president.
Read "Symposium addresses new media in art history" in The Chronicle, SCAD's weekly newspaper and the official source for information about the college's events, people, policies and programs.
Cover image: First Contact, Timothy Jackson and the Synth/Ops Reasearch Group, 2001.
Click here to view the 2008 call for papers.
Friday, April 14 , 1-5 p.m.
Orleans Hall, 201 Barnard St., Savannah, Ga.
The New Renaissance - An Interactive Paradigm
The Savannah College of Art and Design Art History Symposium will explore an idea introduced by Don Foresta during a guest lecture at SCAD in 2005. He suggested that we are entering a second renaissance, a rebirth of an interdisciplinary praxis that enables integrated forms of research and knowledge production. This new renaissance grows out of the dramatic technological and cultural changes brought about during the late 19th and 20th centuries and amplified into a more integrated synthesis in art and design praxis as we enter the 21st century. Such a new renaissance is producing a cultural reality in which the collection and communication of information increasingly relies on interactivity within such a paradigm.
This symposium will explore how digital forms of expression and artistic practice are also defining a new set of aesthetic values. Overall, our hope is that a public dialogue concerning these emerging issues and the artistic practices they have engendered will reveal the ways in which artists, designers and the public engage with the world around them using emerging technologies and interactive modalities. SCAD students will have a rare opportunity to consider these issues and shifting values, and to take part in a dialogue within the context of a broad theoretical and historical framework grounded in the presentations of a distinguished panel of research scholars. Afterall, they will participate in the making of such a new renaissance.
- Timothy Jackson, Ph.D.
The Interactive Network and The New Renaissance
For more than a century, art and science have defined a new space for Western society, a space containing the organizational schema of our universe, replacing the clockwork operation of the mechanical universe. It is a visual space, a communication space, an organizational space, a philosophical space, a psychological space, and the space of our imagination where reality and our interaction with it are seen and defined. This space has been proposed by artists, defined by science and made habitable by artists again as it is integrated into our cultural consciousness. The process - a new renaissance in the profoundness of its rupture with the past in how we understand and represent reality - is not complete. Completion will not be for another 50 years, but we have become conscious of it and are, therefore, capable of accelerating and directing it toward new ways of seeing and knowing.
The space will function in time not as a fixed static space, but as one which is partly defined by its evolution. It will be interactive, containing multiple points of view - the observer as actor, actor as observer. Our cultural reality will be found in the collection and communication of those several points of view. The space-time fractal geometry of this space is becoming clearer and will eventually replace the Euclidean geometry of the first renaissance in our imagination.
Every mode of communication has at one of its extremes a form of expression we call art. Art, being the densest form of communication, is often the supreme test of any means of communication. Each work of art contains the entire worldview of the artist and the dimensions necessary to fulfill that need. Art is the means by which we test a communication system, and by doing so, the reality it attempts to portray.
The flux of civilization produces the ideas that produce the tools for the realization of the ideas. In the use of those tools we can see the organizational patterns that are becoming the institutional expression of our future society. The interactive network is now the metaphor of our civilization and its geometry, the geometry of our imagination - the paradigm of the new renaissance.
- Don Foresta, Ph.D.
abstract
abstract
Speakers
Download the 2006 Art History Symposium brochure, which includes the abstracts and bios of this year's speakers.
| • | Timothy Jackson, Ph.D., Savannah College of Art and Design |
| • | Don Foresta, Ph.D., MARCEL Network, Paris "The Interactive Network and the New Renaissance" |
| • | N. Katherine Hayles, Ph.D., University of California-Los Angeles "My Mother was a Computer" |
| • | Michael Joyce, Vassar College "Together in Their Disharmony: Internet Collaboration and 'Le Cadavre Exquise'" |
| • | Edward Shanken, Ph.D., Savannah College of Art and Design "Artists in Industry and the Academy: Collaborative Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship and the Interpretation of Hybrid Forms" |
Webcast
Click here to view a recording of the 2006 symposium webcast.
Symposium co-chairs
| • | Timothy Jackson |
| • | Andrew Nedd |
Organizing committee
| • | Don Foresta |
| • | James Janson |
| • | Susie Mottram |
| • | Rebecca Trittel |
Acknowledgements
This symposium was made possible with the support of the School of Liberal Arts and the office of the president.
Read "Symposium addresses new media in art history" in The Chronicle, SCAD's weekly newspaper and the official source for information about the college's events, people, policies and programs.
Cover image: First Contact, Timothy Jackson and the Synth/Ops Reasearch Group, 2001.
