Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, University of Reading, April 11 - 13, 2013

Deadline: Nov 12, 2012

http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/2013-conference/session7

In their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define remediation as 'the formal logic by which new media fashion prior media forms'. Far from a modern construct, however, the authors show that remediation has been an intermittent logic of artistic production from the Middle Ages to the present day. Remediation offers a particularly apt framework for thinking about artistic production in the Middle Ages, and one which eschews the dialectic between originality and reproduction that emerged in later periods.

This session seeks papers that approach medieval art through the lens of remediation, as well as papers that pursue the avenues of inquiry opened up by conceptual intersections between pre- and post-print methodologies of visual expression. How did medieval artists invoke one medium while working in another? What were the motivations behind and the implications of hypermediacy, or, drawing attention to the medium itself? How did the structures or design of one medium come to be cited in another?

Potential topics to be explored include, but are not limited to, architectural reliquaries and canon tables, skeuomorphic objects, incunables that retain or allude to features of manuscripts, as well as wall paintings and sculpture that emulate textiles. Historians of medieval art have been at the forefront of deploying new technology in both research and the classroom. The aim of this session is to further this momentum by forging links between theories inspired by new media and the media of the medieval past.

Please send proposals for 20- to 30-minute papers by 12 November 2012 to:

S.I.Drimmer@gmail.com

Proposals should be sent using the paper proposal form at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2013