Those interested in the topics of the conference might also want to participate in the Centre for Modern Thought Spring Seminar on “Visual Technologies and Technological Embodiments.”

The “New Media” is perhaps the most discussed field in the arts and the humanities today, reflecting a desire to engage with and understand the way in which digital technologies have revolutionized the practice of everyday life by becoming an integral part of how we work, communicate, understand ourselves, make art as well as war. The extraordinary attention received by the new media does not, however, come with a consensus about the interpretive frameworks most appropriate for these materials, or about the boundaries of the field and its connections to other discipline and practices. It seems, in fact, that any form of computer-aided image production or performance is potentially eligible for membership in the new media.

The current open-ended approach to the definition of the new media has helped its initial acceptance and visibility, suggesting that some fluidity will have to be maintained in order for the field to evolve across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Still, it is important to think about the possible intellectual, disciplinary, and institutional trajectories that the new media may develop in the near future, and the changes it may bring to the disciplines it will interact with. For instance, what position is the new media likely to occupy in relation to continental philosophy and cultural theory? Will it become clustered with art and film studies or develop as an expansion of traditional media studies? Is it going to find its niche in communication departments, art programs, or science and technology studies departments? And what kind of figurations will emerge from the interaction of “the new media” with disciplines and fields that share its focus on global contexts and the increased obsolesce of the role of the state and of national boundaries? In sum, is the new media only a preliminary label for an emergent set of practices that will be likely to modify existing disciplines while being absorbed by them (the way Web-based practices have now become part of any disciplinary practice)? Or will it develop, instead, into a more specific constellation of practices and discourses to become institutionalized in departments that are heirs to the programs that we see emerging today?

Building on the pioneering work of Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich, Siegfried Zielinski, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Hansen, this conference aims to promote a serious discussion on the place—both intellectual and institutional—of the new media in modern thought, culture, and academia. It does so by bringing together a remarkably broad set of perspectives from academic disciplines and art practices: computer and cognitive science, performance art, physics, computer and surveillance art, biotech, film and visual studies, continental philosophy, performance studies, and science studies. By inviting these participants, we have sought not only disciplinary diversity but also a willingness to engage with new materials and questions. We want to bring key new media theorists and scholars together with theoretically sophisticated practitioners from other fields who may or may not have worked on new media before. New fruitful conceptualizations of the new media and its futures are, we believe, most likely to emerge from such conversations and collaborations.

Important recent work on new media has devoted themselves to founding a new language, explaining how new media and digital technology is evolving, what kind of new knowledge-making tools it is providing, and how new media has changed our sense of embodiment, perceptions of time, space and our notions of reality. Some have done so by focusing on the creative possibilities of the new media, approaching it as an emergent form of art and/or knowledge-making. Others instead have looked at it as yet another step in the development of mechanisms of control—CCTV, global satellite images, databanks, genetic mapping, digital imaging technologies in surveillance projects, information systems, modern warfare, etc. By and large, the new media has rekindled the technophobic fear of intelligent machines at the disposal of an elite few controlling global networks, while also expanding the range of technophilic utopian thought.

In this conference, we want to bypass the traps set by dichotomies between technophilia and technophobia, power and resistance, art and science, technology and the human, and other such binaries. We want, instead, to explore how new media is posing problems to how we think about States, institutions, subjects and materiality itself.

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Mario Biagioli
Christopher Fynsk