22 November 2006

gatescherrywolmark web site

"...as the boundries between practices and processes begin to break down, the work increasingly finds itself in an unfamiliar 'elsewhere' a 'placeless place' that is appropriately hybrid, plural and impure..."

gatescherrywolmark

20 November 2006

San Francisco Art Institute

An interdisciplinary and transnational approach to education in art and culture, students at SFAI are taught based on the fundamental understanding that the contexts in which we live, create, and work are intrinsically global and therefore inextricably linked.

SFAI

Minds, Bodies, Machines

Call for Papers: Minds, Bodies, Machines

This interdisciplinary conference, convened by Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of London, in partnership with the Department of English, University of Melbourne, and software developers Constraint Technologies International (CTI), will take place on 6-7 July 2007 at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, Bloomsbury.

The two-day conference will explore the relationship between minds, bodies and machines in the long nineteenth century. Recent research on the Enlightenment’s frontier technologies has established that era’s preoccupation with developing machinery that could simulate the cognitive and physiological processes of human beings. According to some critics, however, these Promethean ambitions were shelved during the nineteenth century, when the android as artefact was relocated to the realm of the imagination, where it became a threatening figure. According to this reading, the android as scientific project and a figure of possibility only re-emerges in our own era. The aim of this conference is to test this claim by exploring the continuities and discontinuities in the imagining of the human/machine interface in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

The conference organisers – Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck), Deirdre Coleman (Melbourne) and Paul Hyland (CTI) – invite proposals for papers that examine the intersection of minds, bodies and machines during the long nineteenth century. Topics include: the virtual and the real; technologies of the sublime; evolution and machines; techniques of communication; technologies of travel; medical technology; miniaturisation; self-reproduction; and spiritualism.

The conference programme will include plenary addresses, seminars and workshops. Confirmed speakers include: Dr Caroline Arscott, Professor Jay Clayton, Professor Steven Connor, Professor Iain McCalman, Professor Peter Otto, Professor Kevin Warwick and Dr Elizabeth Wilson.

A selection of papers arising from this conference will be published in the online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Abstracts for papers of 20 minutes, as well as details of expected audio-visual needs, should be submitted no later than 28 FEBRUARY 2007. Please send proposals by email to submissions@mindsbodiesmachines.org.

http://www.mindsbodiesmachines.org/conferences.html

07 November 2006

Design Inquiries

Nordic Design Research (NORDES) Call For Papers!
Deadline for submissions: 1 February 2007

Design Inquiries

How can we understand the impact of design for people, companies and society?
How can we provide design practice with appropriate and inspiring knowledge?
How can we use critical design thinking to create new possibilities for the future?

The Nordic Design Research Conference 2007, Design Inquiries, invites contributions that present new critical, empirical and constructive knowledge about design processes and artefacts in use.

Design is understood as a family of practices creating new products, systems and environments. The family resemblance is based on the skilful handling of complex demands, restrictions and technologies to fit different cultural contexts by use of intuitive and heuristic methods as stepping-stones to innovative solutions.

The conference welcomes contributions from different kinds of inquiries as both papers and project presentations. The range includes, but is not restricted to:

Inquiries about Design - studies of design processes, artefacts and design as phenomena utilizing theories and methods from disciplines such as Sociology, History, Philosophy and Management.
Inquiries for Design - studies from within design for a more profound theoretical understanding of the processes, a better integration of different kinds of knowledge, more sophisticated evaluation methods and improved artistic means.
Inquiries by Design - studies that use design thinking and critical and creative methods to explore and develop potentials and possibilities in real-life situations to enhance considerations about the future.

Design Inquiries