March 10–13, 2015
Spencer Museum of Art
Arts Research Collaboration initiative (ARC)
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS
As part of the Arts Research Collaboration initiative sponsored by the University of Kansas Research Investment Council, the Spencer Museum of Art is hosting an international conference on hybrid research practices in the arts, sciences, and technology from the 1960s to today.
The conference—which will be held March 10–13 at The Commons at KU—will explore three major aspects of hybrid artistic research:
– key hybrid projects from the past 50 years, including Experiments in Art & Technology, Art & Technology, and the Artist Placement Group
– shared vocabularies and the role of language in cross-disciplinary collaboration
– the impact of interdisciplinary work on the identity of the hybrid practitioner
With these themes the conference seeks to broaden understandings of a pivotal period in America’s history and in American art by investigating the cultural, political, and social factors that enabled and encouraged such projects to emerge. Based on this thorough examination of early hybrid practices and practitioners, the project aims to discover why similar collaborative work is undertaken less frequently today and how such work might be stimulated and sustained.
The conference will feature four keynote presenters:
– Anne Collins Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and past CAA president
– Mark Dion, an internationally renowned artist whose work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world
– Craig Richardson, a Scottish artist, curator, writer, and scholar who brings an international perspective on hybrid practices
– D. Graham Burnett, editor of Cabinet magazine and a 2013–14 Guggenheim Fellow investigating connections between the sciences and the visual arts.
Together with papers and keynote presentations, the conference will incorporate performative and event-based creative projects grounded in hybrid art-science-technology research. Thanks to generous support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at KU, this conference is free and open to the public.
All presentations and sessions will be live-streamed on the conference website. For those in the San Francisco area, a special viewing of the live stream will be hosted by the Arts Research Center at the University of California–Berkeley.
