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Call for Papers, CIRN Prato Conference 2017, Italy

Prato Conference 2017, 25-27 October 2017 @ Monash University Centre, Prato, Italy

General Call for Papers & Special Stream: Art as Archive: Archive as Art & The Imagined Archive

Background to the Conference

Since the founding colloquium in 2003, the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) has been marked by informality, collegiality and interdisciplinary thinking, bringing together people from many different countries in an ideal Italian setting.

Themes have ranged across issues such as privilege, gender and sexual identities, forms of knowledge, documentation, participation and community-based research, power, ideals and reality, and measurement.

We consider papers related to any aspect of Community Informatics Community Archiving, or Development Informatics. We are particularly interested in papers from researchers and practitioners that can address the challenges of locating community-based research within wider theoretical and practice frameworks.

This year, we have also chosen a theme that we hope traverses new spaces and boundaries and provokes thinking (and action) between different communities of interest. Thus, those focussed in more conventional activity in community, development and archival informatics may be provoked by what those in the art and archives space have to show and tell, and the reverse also applies. As we discuss the conference theme with different parties, more detail will be added. There is no reason to think that your ‘conventional’ work whether in the ‘traditional’ informatics space or in the ‘art’ space will not be of mutual interest. Given that all of us intersect in our use of different media and modes of production, and we probably intersect in theory as well (or not ) something is bound to happen… Present and see what happens!!

Our (inter-) disciplinary frame

Community Informatics is primarily concerned with improving the well-being of people and their communities through more effective use of ICTs. Community Informatics foregrounds social change and transformative action in emergent social-technical relationships rather than prediction and control and likewise, Development Informatics or ICT4D is concerned with ICTs in the international development context. This orientation also has much in common with Community Archiving.

Community-centric archival research, education and practice are concerned with empowering communities in support of such desirable objectives as democracy, human and civil rights, self-determination, sustainable development, and social inclusion. Recordkeeping and archiving are fundamental infrastructural components supporting community information, self-knowledge and memory needs, thus contributing to resilient communities and cultures and supporting reconciliation and recovery in the aftermath of conflict, oppression.

This year’s special theme: Art as Archive: Archive as Art & The Imagined Archive

There has long been discussion about the relationship between art and archives, not just in the sense that archives may represent curated collections relating to specific artists or forms of art, but that art may be used to provide new ways of conceiving what is in archival collections, and new ways of thinking about the nature and meaning of those collections. These themes were explored by a number of papers discussing radical archives at Prato 2016, but this year we wish to go further explore the relationship from multiple perspectives.

The Venice Biennale has often used the idea of the archive to frame its exhibitions, and the 2015 exhibition, All the World’s Futures, Curated by Okwui Enwezor ) had numerous artworks and installations drawn from historic collections and archives, including the installations “The Rock and Roll Public Library”, and Australian artist Marco Fusinato’s “From the Horde to the Bee” showcasing books consisting of scanned copies of resources from Milan’s radical left-wing Primo Maroni Archive. Okwui Enwezor’s has explored such themes before, notably in a 2008 exhibition at the International Center of Photography, entitled “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” which featured works taking archival documents as their starting point, his purpose being to “rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss “.

In his 2004 essay, art historian Hal Foster (2004) defined archival art as “a genre that “make[s] historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present. To this end [archival artists] elaborate on the found image, object, and favour the installation format”. It is not hard to extend this line of reasoning to the role of the Internet as archive.

More generally, art can serve to explore themes that are central to the concept and role of the archive. For example, Guasch argues that photography itself represents a kind of archive, with the photograph presenting a “non-hierarchical worldview” (ref) while others, such as Whitney McVeigh, explore the concepts of “personal and collective history, linking our common threads through land, our clothes, our everyday belongings and our philosophies” (Human Fabric ). Such work breaches the divide between the real and imagined archive.

See Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3-22.

Committee

  • Tom Denison, Monash University
  • Vince Dzekian, Monash University
  • Joanne Evans, Monash University
  • Anne Gilliland, UCLA
  • Kiera Ladner, University of Manitoba
  • Sue McKemmish, Monash University (Chair)
  • David Nemer, University of Kentucky
  • Safiya Noble, UCLA
  • Colin Rhinesmith, University of Oklahoma
  • Mauro Sarrica, Sapienza University, Rome
  • Larry Stillman, Monash University (conference organisation and administration)
  • Martin Wolske, University of Illinois

What to submit?

For Prato 2017 we are seeking papers in all areas of community, development and community archives informatics.

We also seek papers, presentations & art installations that explore issues for the special theme.

Thus, you can submit traditional papers (refereed, non-refereed), works in progress, papers, presentations or installations and short papers for the Research Student stream.

As stated, we will also consider papers (refereed), works-in-progress, workshop proposals and posters, and proposals for installations and displays.

We also have a strong stream for students in Research Students (Masters and Phds) who wish to present their work to a larger audience.

The general paper limit is 7000 words, for students, 2-3000.

Submissions can be made via the submission database