CFP: [Re]Configurations: Arts, Humanities, and Technology in the Urban Environment (5/12/06; dates not noted)

full name / name of organization: 
HMeltzer_at_bmcc.cuny.edu
contact email: 

Here is the Call for Papers in Plain Text
Howard Meltzer

[Re]Configurations: Arts, Humanities, and Technology in the Urban
Environment

We invite individual papers and session proposals addressing the conference
theme from all possible disciplinary angles, such as its representation in
literature, the visual arts, political essays, or scientific and
philosophical writings. We welcome submissions for poster or portfolio
presentation and musical performance as well.

In addition to the conference theme, papers on all other aspects of the
interaction of technology, science, and the humanities are welcome.

The conference theme addresses the role of the visual and performing arts
and technologies in the urban environment. As locations for human
activity, cities would seem to invite interactions of the arts, humanistic
concerns, and technology. Our disciplinary emphasis on expertise often
results in isolation of individual fields. Our cities consign the arts to
limited precincts within the urban environment, while technologies,
represented as largely neutral, value-free and beyond politics and
identity, appear to function without concern for aesthetics. Here in Lower
Manhattan, our technology has reconfigured the landscape, changing the very
shape of the island on which the city is built, creating the buildings that
tower over the streets of the old colonial settlement, adding all the
infrastructure of a modern urban environment. While the parklands created
on the riverfront have integrated artworks and landscaping with new
buildings, development within the business core itself seems haphazard and
less human in scale. Recent events have forced open the possibilities for
reconfiguration. We invite consideration of possibilities for a humane
urban environment.
We welcome consideration of new materials, media, technologies and academic
disciplines (and cross-disciplines), as a way of integrating this new urban
vision of community with artistic and aesthetic concerns.

Proposals may be directed to
Howard S. Meltzer
Department of Music and Art, S115
Borough of Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
hmeltzer_at_bmcc.cuny.edu

Submission Deadline: May 12, 2006

Howard S. Meltzer, PhD
Deputy Chair, Department of Music and Art
Borough of Manhattan Community College, S-110F
199 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007
212 220-8000, ext. 5032

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Received on Fri Apr 07 2006 - 10:38:02 EDT