Networked Images.
Artistic Practices Before and After the Internet

Organised by Eva Ehninger, Basel University and 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

14.00	Introduction: Eva Ehninger, University of Basel;  Antje Krause-Wahl, Gutenberg University, Mainz
14.30 – 15.15	Painting in the Digital Age: Critical Possibilities;  Aline Guillermet, University of Cambridge
15.15 – 16.00	Automatisms: Serial Photography between Apparatus and Net;  Birk Weiberg, Zurich University of the Arts
break
16.30 – 17.15	Gesture, Glitch, and Discourse: Techniques of Remontage «Against the Digital»; Toni Hildebrandt, University of Bern, Istituto Svizzero Rome
17.15 – 18.00	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
13.45 – 14.30	Rites of Density: Aaron Flint Jamison; Simon Baier, University of Vienna
14.30 – 15.15	Juliana Huxtable’s Networked Body;  Antje Krause-Wahl, Gutenberg University, Mainz
break
15.45 – 16.30	R-U-In?S: Survival, Peer-networks and Niche Evolution in Art After the Internet; Cadence Kinsey, University College London