Call for Papers and Conference: Constellations, Clusters, Networks

Call for Papers
Deadline: December 1, 2014

Concordia University’s Art History Graduate Student Association seeks submissions for Constellations, Clusters, Networks, the 2015 international graduate conference taking place between March 5 - 7, 2015 at Concordia University in Montreal.

Networks have been taken up extensively in recent arts, humanities and social science research. This emerging trend is evidenced in new techniques made possible through computation technologies, in biological and cognitive sciences, and in sociological and anthropological methodologies that explore the networks of social and political dynamics. Markedly, networks have also surfaced in recent art historical research. This emergence has seen art historians’ attention to networks in content (though exploration of networks of art objects and artists’ networking), in methodological approaches (through the building of conceptual networks), and in critical models (through the elaboration of networked connections of cultural content).
 
In line with these concerns, current and recent graduate students are invited to propose presentations of research concerning networks and networking in art and culture, as they figure in content, methodological approaches, and critical models. The conference will embrace papers, panels, performances and roundtable workshops, by emerging scholars in any discipline. We encourage proposals for contributions to these multiple avenues for academic and professional exchange.
 
Potential topics for contributions include:

• network-based art and media
Internet, broadcast, publication, correspondence…
 
• network forms
interactivity, montage, collage, quotation, hybridity, pastiche…
 
• social networks
collaboration, communities, language, ethnicities, kinships…
 
• network methods
Actor-Networks, systems theories, cybernetics…
 
• institutional & professional networks
artist guilds, unions, fraternities, leagues, scenes and movements…
 
• global networks
empires and dominions, transnationalism, trade, travel, Indigenous and settler experience…
 
• network science
visualizations, statistics, complex systems, big data…
 
• disarticulations: gaps in the network
outsiders, invisibility, ephemera…
 
• economic networks
production and development, transactions, exchange, (im/material) labour...
 
• viruses and memes
contagion, infection, circulation…
 
Please send a 300 word abstract (English or French), CV and brief biographical note, including contact and institutional affiliation to: ahgsaconference@gmail.com
Artists may also include several images (less than five, maximum 72dpi).
Please send in a single PDF, RTF, ODF or Word document.

Full conference information can be found at: ahgsa.concordia.ca/annual-graduate-conference