International konference på Statens Museum for Kunst, 21.-23. januar 2010 om ”The Artwork between Technology and Nature”.
For tilmelding og info se www.ant.au
Occasioned by the exhibitions Nature Strikes Back and Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change, running in parallel to the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, this art historical conference will explore the relationship between art, nature and technology. The present climate crisis foregrounds the observation that during the last century human technology has come to play a crucial role in the overall behaviour of nature, both as a disturber of ecological balances and as a potential healer of them.
Parallel to this development, art seems to have become more closely involved with both nature and technology, challenging, on the one hand, conceptions of art contemplating nature as a distant landscape and, on the other hand, art as being foreign to the social interaction and physical dynamics of technology. These approaches often highlight art’s critical and reflective function, and yet in art’s very interchange with nature and technology there are certain reminiscences of the ancient and medieval periods in which art and technology were aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods – the Latin ars and the Greek technè – and in which this area was thought to function according to principles imitating nature.
This conference focuses on both these post-modern convergences and their forerunners in the modern and pre-modern periods. Questions to be addressed include the ways art has been related to the two domains of nature and technology in different historical epochs – whether art, nature and technology have been coordinated to harmonising syntheses or rather placed in fields of antagonism, and whether they share certain genetic principles or are created according to different paradigms.