Enfilade

Seventh Annual Art History Symposium: The Real & The Fake
California State University, Sacramento, 16 April 2011

Proposals due by 25 January 2011

Keynote speaker: Erkki Huhtamo (Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of California Los Angeles). Huhtamo has lectured worldwide and published extensively on media archaeology and the media arts. His new book on the history of the moving panorama and the diorama, Illusions in Motion: A Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

The Real & the Fake, the theme of the 2011 symposium, is inspired in part by the concurrent new media exhibition, The Aesthetics of the Fake, which will be on view in the University Library Gallery from March 31 to June 4, 2011. While the exhibition looks at contemporary artists’ use of virtual 3D computer graphics for avant-garde purposes, the art history symposium seeks a wider range of papers that would position this fundamental dialectic of art in any time, place, and culture and in a variety of artistic media. Among the many topics that would make an exciting day-long conversation on this theme are Renaissance scientific perspective/illusionism; Realism and social truths; alternative and subjective realities of Magic Realism, Surrealism, and abstraction; truths and paradoxes of avant-gardes; the problematics of optical illusion/mimesis; tradition, authenticity and tourist art; commercial animation, advertising, Second Life, and hyperreality. Non-Western, comparative, and transcultural considerations are welcome, as are papers on architecture. Please send a 300-word proposal for a 25-minute lecture and a one-paragraph professional biography as an email attachment to Elaine O’Brien, eobrien@csus.edu.