CfP reminder: Art in Academia

The relationship between art and research can take different shapes and meanings. Recent decades have seen an increase in artists getting involved in traditionally academic research settings, collaborating with scientists, philosophers, engineers, and the like. At the same time, artistic production itself, under the name of Artistic Research, has gained more recognition as a legitimate tool for the generation of knowledge within academic institutions. Moreover, non-artists and academic researchers have also engaged in artistic projects that complement their own research by offering alternative epistemologies within their field. The different interactions between art and academia seem to offer new perspectives to known and complex issues across different fields, allowing artists and researchers to blur the lines between artistic practice and research.

The conference Art in Academia seeks contributions from graduate students, scholars, and artists, addressing the interaction between artistic production and academic research. Possible topics for the presentations may include, but are not limited to:

• Science-art collaboration, and artistic complementation to academic research: art multiplying possibilities and offering epistemological alternatives to research (alternative histories, ontologies, theories, and concepts); an artistic approach to phenomena that are overlooked by the sciences or are impossible to address scientifically (cultural, gender-specific, social, existential aspects and meanings of the explananda phenomena, Haraway’s idea of “situated knowledge”, individual subjectivities, etc.); an artistic expression of scientific findings; artists working in labs (artists in white coats).
• Art in academia vs. artistic research: art informed by academic research; enhancing artistic expressivity, developing new artistic media by means of academic research or newly designed technologies; art as a continuation of academic research; academic researchers doing art informally.
• Art as meta- : art as a form of meta-discourse on one’s research area, its theoretical apparatus, methods and acceptable data; artistic reflection on dominant and minority discourses within a particular institution, research field or academia in general; art as a framework for interpretation, further development of research findings; art as a framework for application of newly developed technologies.
• Research targets and art: Cognition, Consciousness, Time, Memory, Identity, Sustainability, Action, and others.
• Artists in academic settings: from inter- and multidisciplinary to transdisciplinarity; mediation and facilitation of communication between artists, scholars, and technicians; techno-scientific (technological, economic, ideological, political, cultural, and scientific) environments for the collaboration between art, science, and technology.
• Meta-theoretical, epistemological and curatorial issues regarding the interaction between art, science and technology: a critical perspective on art generating new knowledge; elaboration of new or revision of an existing conceptual apparatus to scaffold developing relationships between art and science, art and technology; evaluation and recognition of projects at the intersection of art and science.

Submission guidelines:

We invite papers under 2,000 words suitable for a 15–20 minutes presentation. Papers accompanied by an abstract of up to 200 words should be prepared together with the applicant’s CV in PDF or Word format and emailed to [email protected] by December 21, 2017. The paper should include the author’s name, paper title, institutional affiliation (if any), and contact details.

We encourage submissions by independent artists not affiliated with academic institutions.

The conference is part of the academic-artistic event Art IN Academia hosted by the Department of Philosophy of Central European University, the Center for Arts and Culture (Central European University), and The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives. The event includes a group exhibition of artworks done by CEU students devoted to the interaction between art and academia, at Galeria Centralis (OSA). The participation in the conference and in the opening event are free of charge.