The Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen is holding a conference on “Recoded: Landscapes and Politics of New Media” (April 25-26, 2008), featuring many of the international leaders in the field: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Brown); Sande Cohen (CalArts); Alexander Galloway (NYU); Ken Goldberg (Berkeley); Mark Hansen (Chicago); Thomas Keenan (Bard); Tim Lenoir (Duke); Tom Levin (Princeton); Laura Marks (Simon Fraser); Colin Milburn (Davis); Trevor Paglen (Berkeley); Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, (Aberdeen); Brian Rotman (OSU); Julia Scher (Kunsthochschule für Medien, Köln); Eugene Thacker (Georgia Tech); Sha-Xin Wei (Concordia); Siegfried Zielinski (Universität der Künste, Berlin) and commentaries by Mario Biagioli (Aberdeen and Harvard), Arnold Davidson (Chicago); Christopher Fynsk (Aberdeen), Peter Galison (Harvard), and Alberto Moreiras (Aberdeen and SUNY Buffalo).

The conference program also features the UK premiere of Peter Galison and Rob Moss Secrecy (2007) – a 2007 Sundance Festival Selection (www.secrecyfilm.com).

The "New Media" is perhaps the most discussed field in the arts and the humanities today, reflecting a desire to engage with and understand the way in which digital technologies have revolutionized the practice of everyday life by becoming an integral part of how we work, communicate, understand ourselves, make art as well as war. The extraordinary attention received by the new media does not, however, come with a consensus about the interpretive frameworks most appropriate for these materials, or about the boundaries of the field and its connections to other discipline and practices.

This conference aims to promote a serious discussion on the place of the new media in modern thought, culture, and the university by presenting a broad set of perspectives from academic disciplines and art practices, and by bringing together key new media theorists and scholars together with theoretically sophisticated practitioners from other fields. New fruitful conceptualizations of the new media and its futures are, we believe, most likely to emerge from such conversations.

Committed to bypassing the traps set by dichotomies between technophilia and technophobia, power and resistance, art and science, technology and the human, and other such binaries, the conference wants to explore how new media is posing problems to how we think about States, institutions, subjects and materiality itself.

Registration information, full program, abstracts, and bios can be found at: www.abdn.ac.uk/modernthought /recoded/

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Mario Biagioli
Chris Fynsk