Now is the time #1: Media

Lectures by Kaja Silverman and Laura Marks

1 Jan 2008
31 Dec 2008

In previous decades the mixing of different media and art genres was principally an attempt to break with the modernist desire for purity and medium specificity. Terms such as ‘multimedia’, ‘mixed media’ and ‘intermedia’ were created to describe new fusions within the arts in other fields of operation, outside the white cube. Digital media also generated a democratic revolution. Everyone can become a multimedia artist. What is the status of the medium in art production and the discourse in art, in this situation referred to by Rosalind Krauss as the ‘postmedium condition’? How can an artist act critically in this complex cultural field now dominated by multimedia and mass media? How can this essentially Western discourse be related to the artistic production in non-Western cultures?

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Now is the Time -

With:
Kaja Silverman, Laura Marks, Margriet Schavemaker

Speakers

Kaja Silverman (US) is Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California, Berkeley. Her specialist topics are cinema, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, time-based visual art and literature. Silverman’s numerous publications include Speaking About Godard (1998) and World Spectators (2000). Flesh of My Flesh will appear in 2009.
Laura Marks (CAN) is Professor in Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She specialises in new media art, experimental cinema, film theory and Arab and Islamic arts. Marks’s publications include The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000) and the forthcoming Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art.

Moderator

Sudeep Dasgupta (NL) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.


Now is the Time: Art and Theory in the 21st Century is a series of seven lecture evenings dedicated to seven themes that encircle the complex arena in which the arts of the new millennium are situated. Socially engaged themes like 9/11, globalisation and the turn to religion of our contemporary society are juxta­posed with subjects that are more directly related to art, such as the return of Romanticism, the primacy of design and the status of the artwork in what is referred to as ‘the postmedium condition’.

Now is the Time is a collaboration between:
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,
University of Amsterdam, W139,
SMBA and METROPOLIS M

Location:
Oude Lutherse Kerk, Auditorium of the University of Amsterdam
Singel 411 (Corner Spui)
1012 WN Amsterdam

Lecture Hours:
8 p.m. – 10.30 p.m.
doors open at 7.30 p.m.

Go to the Now is the Time website for reservations