CFP: “Towards a More Inclusive Digital Art History” (PANORAMA: JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN ART)

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art invites submission of 500-word proposals for feature articles focused on Digital Art History to be published as part of the new initiative, “Towards a More Inclusive Digital Art History,” which is supported by a major grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Panorama (journalpanorama.org) is the first peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication dedicated to American art and visual culture (broadly defined). The Journal encourages a broad range of perspectives and approaches within an interdisciplinary framework encompassing both local and global contexts and is published by the University of Minnesota Libraries.

The goal of “Toward a More Inclusive Digital Art History” is twofold—to increase both inclusivity and access. First, in order to encourage a more comprehensive approach to the history of American art, we seek to publish digital art history scholarship that focuses on the contributions of constituencies that have historically been marginalized and/or under-researched, and to make this available worldwide, for free and with open access. Second, our priorities will be accessibility, manageability, and sustainability. To that end, we seek proposals, both collaborative and individual, from scholars with all levels of knowledge about the digital humanities and will prioritize supporting scholars who may have little or no institutional support for digital scholarship. We aim to provide a model for sustainable digital art history research that can be accessible to a wide range of scholars, including those who will need to learn digital humanities methods without institutionally provided technical assistance. We also encourage computational approaches to art-historical analysis that employ low-cost, open-source applications. In this way, the project will provide models for other scholars to emulate regardless of financial or institutional support. Finally, we plan to encourage the accessibility and sustainability of digital art history by doing something that is all-but unprecedented in the field: We will publish and preserve the datasets underlying scholars’ peer-reviewed research along with their articles and project narratives. This will enable other scholars to view and test the data on which the research is based and employ the data for their own teaching and research, thereby expanding the project’s reach.

Panorama invites submission of proposals for feature articles to be published as part of this new initiative, “Towards a More Inclusive Digital Art History.” Selected authors will be invited to participate in a Digital Humanities workshop in Washington, DC, in October 2020. This workshop will give participants the opportunity to develop their research projects with Panorama’s editorial team and experts in the field of digital publishing. The first article in this series will be published in 2021.

To submit a proposal, send your c.v. and an abstract of approximately 500 words that summarizes the topic of the proposed essay, how it represents scholarship on understudied areas of American art, and why it could benefit from a digital art historical approach. Authors do not need to identify precisely which digital methods they would like to use—this will be addressed at the workshop and determined in collaboration with Panorama editors. Instead, use the abstract to explain why the research questions addressed in the essay could benefit from—or even demand—a digital approach. The Terra Foundation has also provided some funding to support attendance at the Workshop, so please also let us know if you require assistance with accommodation and travel expenses.

Proposals should be sent to journalpanorama@gmail.com with the subject heading “Digital Art History CFP response” and are due April 15.

CFP: “Art and the Technicity of Race” (special issue of MEDIA-N: JOURNAL OF THE NEW MEDIA CAUCUS)

Megan Driscoll and Johanna Gosse are soliciting papers on “Art and the Technicity of Race.” Please see below.

Art and the Technicity of Race

A decade ago, Beth Coleman and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun introduced the concept of race and/as technology.* Turning to Heidegger’s notion of techne as prosthesis or skill, Coleman and Chun imagine race itself as a technology that can be leveraged, a tool for navigating systems of power. This distances race from its mythological status as biological fact, creating a critical framework that returns historical agency to the individual and helps us understand how race and ethnicity function in the visual–and technological–world.

Recently, the concept has received renewed attention as the intersections between race and ethnicity and the technological have come to the fore in popular discourse, raised by issues ranging from representation in film to bias in facial recognition. Critical work by scholars such as Simone Browne and Lisa Nakamura and the Precarity Lab has also continued to interrogate the technicity of race and its relationship to other technologies, both historical and contemporary. Artistic research and practice on the subject, however, has often been either neglected or instrumentalized as illustrative of a larger debate.

This special issue of Media-N responds to the urgent need to examine the state of dialogue on race and/as technology in art practice, history, and criticism. It will feature a ten years on reflection on the concept by Beth Coleman, opening discussion onto the way this framework has shaped, and has been shaped by, art of the past and present.

We seek contributions that explore how art sheds light not only on the relationship between race, ethnicity, and the technological, but on race itself as, in the words of Coleman, “a disruptive technology that changes the terms of engagement with an all-too-familiar system of representation and power” (178). Issues to consider include, but are certainly not limited to:

  • The impact of the race and/as technology hermeneutic on artistic research and practice of the past decade.
  • The influence of visual technologies and aesthetic practice on discourses surrounding sociohistorical concepts like blackness and brownness.
  • The imaging of historical and/or contemporary flows of migration and diaspora.
  • International communication media and tensions between the global/local.
  • The use of visual technologies to negotiate power between citizens and the state.
  • Light and color bias in the material/processes/procedures of photography, film, and digital media.
  • Bias and violence in both the inputs and outputs of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
  • Anxieties about race and visual truth sparked by technologies ranging from DNA testing to deepfakes.
  • Ethnicity and surveillance capitalism after 9/11 and/or the long tail of surveillance capitalism inaugurated under trans-Atlantic slavery and European colonialism.

Submissions addressing artistic practices from any time period or region are welcomed from scholars, critics, artists, designers, scientists, media-makers, and interdisciplinary researchers from across the humanities and sciences.

*See Beth Coleman, “Race as Technology,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 24, no. 1 (70) (May 1, 2009): 176-207; and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology, or How to Do Things to Race,” in Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White, and Alondra Nelson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 38-60.

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Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus (ISSN: 1942-017X) is a scholarly, invitational, and double blind peer-reviewed journal. The journal provides a forum for scholarly research, artworks and projects, and is open to submissions in the form of papers, reports, and reviews of exhibitions and books on new media art. Media-N is an English language journal, and all submissions must be received in English adhering to the standards set by the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

TIMELINE:

June 30, 2020: Deadline for submission of abstracts.

August 1, 2020: Notification of accepted proposals and invitation to submit paper.

December 15, 2020: Projected deadline for submission of final papers.

ABSTRACT GUIDELINES:

Please send your proposal by email with the following information combined into a single document:

-Proposal title, and a 300-500 word abstract, plus 1-2 images if desired.

-Please include your name, email, and title/affiliation on abstract.

-A condensed CV (no longer than 3 pages).

NOTE: Materials should be submitted in English, as a Word document or PDF.

File should not exceed 5MB.

SEND INQUIRIES & SUBMISSIONS TO:

Megan Driscoll, Special Issue Guest Editor: md@megandriscoll.net Johanna Gosse, Executive Editor: johannagosse@gmail.com

Edmonia Lewis on The View — VARIETY . SPICE . LIFE

For Valentine’s Day, EL is part of the conversation on The View Here’s her Cupid Caught In A Trap (1872-76) SAAM

via Edmonia Lewis on The View — VARIETY . SPICE . LIFE