The international conference Rethinking the Past: Experimental Histories in the Arts will take place at the University of Technology Sydney between July 28-29, 2006.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Professor Laura U. Marks
Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Professor Andrew Benjamin
Professor of Critical Theory in Architecture and Design, University of Technology Sydney
Professor Ross Gibson
Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, University of Technology, Sydney
Dr Klaus Neumann
Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Melbourne
Conference Theme:
Drawing together scholars from a broad range of fields, the aim of the conference is to rethink the task of historiography via an exploration of experimental representations of – and or engagements with – the past in fields as diverse as film, literature, art, architecture, photography, theatre, music, fictocritical writing, dance, video and new media. Questions addressed by the conference will include:
- How have writers, filmmakers, artists etc. sought to explore and redeem aspects of the past which have fallen outside of what has been monumentalised as historically significant?
- What role have the arts played in destabilising historicist accounts of history as a form of evolutionary progress?
- What possibilities have been attributed to artists, writers, new media practitioners etc. in theoretical accounts of the task of an experimental historiography?
- How have people working in the arts sought to cleave open a space within official accounts of the relationship between the past and the present within which the possibilities of the past (and the future) can be re-imagined and re-explored?
