Please excuse cross-postings.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Martha Radice</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:martha.radice@dal.ca">martha.radice@dal.ca</a>></span><br>
Date: Thu, May 30, 2013 at 2:45 PM<br>Subject: CFP: Urban Encounters: Art and the Public, deadline June 30<br>To: Martha Radice <<a href="mailto:Martha.Radice@dal.ca">Martha.Radice@dal.ca</a>><br><br><br>Dear colleagues, <br>
Please circulate this CFP to those who might be interested in it. I've attached a PDF version in case that's easier to send around, but the text is exactly the same as the text below. Thank you!<br>
Martha <br><br>---------------------------------------------------<br><br>CALL FOR PAPERS (please circulate)<br><br>Urban Encounters: Art and the Public<br>Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, October 10-12, 2013<br><br>Public
art installations are increasingly being created and used to open up
new lines of inquiry into the socialities of urban public space. As
cities strive to be indexed as culturally dynamic and ‘creative’, the
stakes of artistic production in public space are raised ever higher.
Yet there has been little rigorous research into how the interactions
between art and the public actually play out in the urban social
context. This interdisciplinary colloquium brings together artists and
researchers to explore how artworks in diverse media and genres can
shape the urban public – the patterned and unpredictable encounters,
events, and flows of city life – and, conversely, how the urban public
can shape artistic production. We ask:<br>
<br>- What forms are artistic engagements with the city taking, and how do they influence the city’s people and places?<br>- How does the urban public encounter art in the city, and how do these encounters affect the structure and content of the work?<br>
- What kinds of urban publics are generated through art?<br>- How can we investigate and interpret encounters between art and the public in urban spaces?<br><br>Site-specific
artworks in public space have the potential to change the ways in which
members of the public experience their cities. Artworks that fit into
the interstices of the city – the car parks or alleyways, the gaps
between buildings – open up these spaces for new exploration. Artworks
that appropriate central urban places, like main squares or monuments,
can reframe or subvert their dominant meanings. Art can alter the fabric
of the city by projecting images or sounds onto its architectural
surfaces. Art can use new media technologies to create circuits for the
urban to flow from ‘real’ to ‘virtual’ and back again. In short, art can
disrupt and rework the social and affective spaces of the city.<br>
<br>Moreover, while all art is interactive, in the sense that people
react to and therefore interact with it, many artists are experimenting
with work that exists only through explicit engagement with the public
in some form. This can mean attending carefully to the structures and
rhythms of public spaces, such that their surfaces or sounds, for
instance, are built into the piece. Or it can mean creating art that is
activated by participants’ gestures in situ or accessed via individuals’
mobile devices. Art can be crowdsourced, with conduits set up for
incorporating textual or visual contributions from members of the
public. More rarely, viewers’ experiences of art might be directly
integrated into the work itself. Still other kinds of public art are
conversation pieces (Kester), generated through more or less long-term
collaborations with groups of people investigating specific urban social
problems in creative ways. Artistic engagement with the urban public
can generate original, sometimes surprising encounters.<br>
<br>This colloquium will engage these themes through academic papers,
artists’ talks, exhibitions, and workshops on interdisciplinary
collaboration. We invite submissions for scholarly papers that focus on
the themes of the colloquium from academics, researchers and artists
working in the social sciences, humanities, urban planning,
architecture, fine arts and media arts. Space is limited, as the aim
here is to give ample time for in-depth presentation and discussion of
high-quality papers, circulated before the colloquium, with a view to
producing a special journal issue. Send an abstract of up to 250 words,
along with authors’ names, affiliations and email and postal addresses
to <a href="mailto:tracingthecity@gmail.com" target="_blank">tracingthecity@gmail.com</a> by June 30.<br>
<br>Conference organizers: Solomon Nagler (NSCAD University); Kim Morgan
(NSCAD University); Martha Radice (Dalhousie University). Contact <a href="mailto:tracingthecity@gmail.com" target="_blank">tracingthecity@gmail.com</a> for further information.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br clear="all">
<br><br><br>-- <br>Dr Martha Radice<br>
Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University <br>6135 University Avenue, PO BOX 15000, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2. Tel. <a href="tel:902.494.6747" value="+19024946747" target="_blank">902.494.6747</a> <br><a href="mailto:martha.radice@dal.ca" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://sociologyandsocialanthropology.dal.ca/Faculty/Martha_Radice.php" target="_blank">http://sociologyandsocialanthropology.dal.ca/Faculty/Martha_Radice.php</a><br>
<br>Office location: McCain 1119. Office hours: Tues 2-3<br>Special issue of Anthropologica: <a href="http://www.anthropologica.ca/issues/current" target="_blank">Montréalology</a><br>
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