SUPER HUMAN: Revolution of the Species
Presented by The Australian Network for Art & Technology
22 – 26 November 2009
Melbourne, Australia

Inspired by the 150th publication anniversary of Darwin’s evolutionary treatise, On the Origin of the Species, the Super Human: Revolution of the Species suite of events turns the spotlight on contemporary art and science collaborative research and practice and its interpretations of - and impacts upon - the human body.

See www.superhuman.org.au

Symposium: Call For Abstracts
Deadline 30 March 2009

Taking place over two days, the Super Human symposium will present an invigorating and inspiring mix of keynote speakers and collaborative research projects engaging with one or more of the symposium themes: Augmentation, Cognition and Nanoscale Interventions.

Questions that the Symposium will address include, but are not limited to, the following: How do scientific and artistic bodies of knowledge intersect with human, social bodies? Does art serve simply as a representational tool for the sciences or is there more to the picture than that? Does research into bodies and their systems offer an insight into aesthetics, or is it confined to the purely functional?

Abstracts are invited from either individual or team-based researchers, artists and scientists. Submitted abstracts will undergo a double-blind referee process, with successful applicants invited to submit their paper prior to final acceptance.

Symposium proceedings will be published in Second Nature: the International Journal of Creative Media in March 2010. Second Nature is supported by RMIT University’s School of Creative Media. For more information see http://secondnature.rmit.edu.au.

Please submit all abstracts (and any questions you may have) to the Symposium Chair: as@anat.org.au

ANZCA09: Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship

Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference

8 - 10 July 2009

Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Precinct

Kelvin Grove, Brisbane, Australia

Communication exists as an everyday social practice, as a skill or art applied in a range of contexts (business, politics, entertainment, etc.), as an application of media technologies to reach audiences and communities, and as an interdisciplinary field for teaching, research and scholarship, and community engagement. As creativity is increasingly sought as a socio-cultural practice whose application extends beyond the arts to all aspects of economic and social life, new challenges are being presented for the application of communication in a range of contexts.

Digital media technologies enable new modes of social networking and participation that challenge the sender-receiver, producer-consumer orthodoxies of 20th century mass media and mass communication. Meanwhile, the challenges of globalisation and multicultural societies are presenting both the need and the opportunity for new forms of citizenship that cross national boundaries. These challenges raise questions of global citizenship and public communication spaces that require new attention to be given to questions of global media ethics and intercultural communicative capacities.

Call for Papers

Full papers and abstracts to be submitted by Friday 6 February 2009.

ANZCA09 welcomes papers from across a range of academic disciplines, including-but not exclusive to-advertising; business and marketing communication; communication studies; digital media and Internet studies; cultural studies; film, media, radio, and television studies; journalism; organisational and interpersonal communication; public relations; and the creative, visual, and performing arts. We particularly welcome the contribution of creative and professional practitioners, as well as those involved in leading-edge research in relevant academic fields.

See: www.anzca09.org

Urban Screens Melbourne 08

Registration Reminder

‘Mobile Publics’ Conference:
BMW Edge, Federation Square, Melbourne, 3-5 October 2008

‘Connected Communities’:
Multimedia Program, Federation Square, 3-8 October 2008

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 (USM08), hosted by Fed Square Pty Ltd, is the first international urban screens conference and exhibition to be staged in the Asia Pacific region, following successful events in Amsterdam in 2005 and Manchester in 2007. USM08 will present an integrated conference program of keynote lectures and panel sessions in the BMW Edge Theatre and an outdoor multimedia program of experimental poster sessions, curated screenings, workshops and screen-based projects.

Registrations are now open for the Mobile Publics conference, which will explore the impact of digital technology and new media on the public space of contemporary cities. Keynote speakers will include:

 

• Aaron Tan, renowned architect and Director of RAD, Hong Kong, who has been a driving force in the urban development of Asian cities,
• Andreas Broeckmann international curator, founding Director of the prestigious Transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture in Berlin,
• Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, and eminent globalisation scholar who wrote the seminal text The Global City.
  
  

A range of panels will be presented on themes such as ‘Art, Technology and Public Space’, ‘Strategies for Urban Regeneration’ and ‘Cross-Cultural Public Networks’ with guest speakers from Australia, Japan, Korea, Germany, Netherlands, Taiwan, UK, and USA including: Professor Ien Ang, ARC Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney; Patrick Fox, Manager of the tenantspin project at FACT, Liverpool; Mike Gibbons, Head of Live Events London 2012; Manray Hsu, curator of the 2008 Taipei Biennial; Yann Le Bellégo, Sales Director, Barco Media, Asia Pacific; Dr Yoshitaka Mori, Tokyo University of the Arts; Dr Melinda Rackham, Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology; Jan Schuijren, curator of Contemporary Art Screen Zuidas in Amsterdam; Mirjam Struppek, President of the International Urban Screens Association; Professor Leon van Schaik AO, Architecture, Innovation Chair, RMIT Melbourne; Soh Yeong Roh, Director of Art Center Nabi in Seoul.

Full conference programme and registration information is now available at:
http://www.urbanscreens08.net/

There will be single tickets available for the keynote session on Friday night and also on Saturday night. They must be booked in advance.

Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering

International Conference

Perth, Western Australia
2-4 December 2008

In association with the National Academy of Screen & Sound, Murdoch University
and the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture, Curtin University

website: http://nass.murdoch.edu.au/nass_conf_fest_trauma.htm

Keynote Speakers:

Felicity Collins
Humanities & Social Sciences,
La Trobe University

Suvendrini Perera
Media, Society and Culture,
Curtin University

Susannah Radstone
Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies,
University of East London

Janet Walker
Film and Media Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara


The humanities have had a long-standing interest in the social and cultural dimensions of human suffering caused by catastrophic events. Contributions made in this area by traditional disciplines such as philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and history have been complemented by the health and human sciences throughout the 20th century. Since the 1980s the degree of attention given by scholars in the humanities to experiences of and responses to such life-shattering events as incest, war, genocide, torture, and terror has increased at a pace described by some as "explosive". As a result, several interrelated, inter-disciplinary fields, such as trauma, memory, and genocide studies, have emerged to constitute an encompassing, rapidly-evolving, and hyper-productive network of studies. In the midst of such developments, cultural, media and film studies, as well as the creative arts, have also paid increasing attention to the literary, visual and performative engagement with human suffering and resilience.

As we quickly approach the second decade of the 21st century the historical events that constitute the ultimate referent of so much theoretical and creative endeavour have unfortunately not waned. It is for the same reason more crucial than ever to open spaces for the considered reflection about the potentials and limitations of myriad, sometimes competing, methodological approaches and modes of creative engagement with human pain and trauma. Interrogating Trauma seeks to provide such a space. Keynote speakers, panels and presenters, as well as the accompanying exhibition and performance of art and media works, will consider methodologies, orthodoxies, and openings in order to articulate strategies for imagining the 'beyond' of trauma through arts and media responses.

PANEL and Individual PAPER proposals are invited with an abstract of no more than 250 words, plus a one-paragraph biography of the author/s. Inter- and trans-disciplinarity is encouraged. Traditional scholarly, ficto-critical and literary writing will be considered. Selected conference papers will be peer-reviewed for publication in a special journal issue or scholarly press anthology. EXHIBITION proposals of creative works that engage with the themes of the conference with an Asia-Pacific trauma focus should contain a brief artist statement and description of the work, including its format and duration or size, of no more than 250 words, plus a one-paragraph biography of the artist/s. Photography, film, video, new media, 2D, sculpture, installation, sound, and live performance works will be considered. Student works are welcome.

Themes include but are not limited to:

Apartheid, Apology, Architecture, Asia-Pacific, Art, Atrocity, Audiences, Bodies, Borders, Catastrophe, Child Soldiers, Cinema, Colonialism, Commemoration, Compensation, Conflict, Counselling, Crime, Death, Desire, Depression, Diasporas, Dictatorships, Disease, Documentary, Education, Everyday, Executions, Exile, Experimental, Exploitation, Famine, Fantasy, Forgiveness, Gender, Genocide, Globalisation, Grief, Havoc, Healing, History, Human Rights, Identities, Illness, Image, Incest, Incitement, Independence, Indigenes, Internet, Invasion, Journalism, Justice, Literature, Location, Media, Memorials, Memory, Migrants, Minorities, Museums, Music, New Media, NGOs, Nostalgia, Oppression, Oral Histories, Pain, People Smuggling, Performance, Perpetrators, Photography, Place, Politics, Post-Colonialism, Post-Memory, PTSD, Poverty, Power, Propaganda, Queer, Racism, Radio, Rape, Reception, Recognition, Reconciliation, Refugees, Reparations, Reportage, Representation, Repression, Resilience, Resistance, Revolt, Revolution, Slavery, Social Suffering, Space, Sublime, Suicide, Survivors, Television, Terror, Testimony, Therapy, Third World, Torture, Tourism, Translation, Trauma, Truth, Victims, Violence, Visual Culture, War, Witnessing, Xenophobia.    

Please send proposals no later than 31 MARCH, 2008 to:

    Mick Broderick <m.broderick@murdoch.edu> or

    Antonio Traverso <a.traverso@curtin.edu.au>

Downloadable one-page conference flier at http://nass.murdoch.edu.au/docs/CFP1page.pdf