UNIVERSITY HOMEPAGE
The Faculty of Humanities
Department of Aesthetic Studies
The Artwork between Technology and Nature
About the conference
The Artwork between Technology and Nature
Programme click here
Registration click here
Keynote speakers:
Professor Lorraine Daston, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin
Professor James Elkins, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Olafur Eliasson, artist
Aarhus University and the national art museum in Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, are organizing an international conference entitled The Artwork between Technology and Nature. The conference will take place at the museum in Copenhagen on 21-23 January 2010 and aims to raise questions and debate focused on art history and theory in continuation of the UN climate change conference taking place in Copenhagen in December 2009.
The museum will simultaneously be showing two exhibitions that are interesting in this context: Nature strikes back, which deals with concepts of nature in art from the Antiquity until today, and Re:think: Living in the age of climate change, in which contemporary artists comment on global climate changes.
The present climate crisis foregrounds the observation that during the last century human technology has come to play a crucial role in the overall behaviour of nature, both as a disturber of ecological balances and as a potential healer of them. Parallel to this development, art seems to have become more closely involved with both nature and technology, challenging, on the one hand, conceptions of art contemplating nature as a distant landscape and, on the other, art as being foreign to the social interaction and physical dynamics of technology. These approaches often highlight art’s critical and reflective function, and yet in art’s very interchange with nature and technology there are certain reminiscences of the ancient and medieval periods in which art and technology were aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods – the Latin ars and the Greek technè – and in which this area was thought to function according to principles imitating nature.
The conference is primarily aimed at the international circles of art historians and other scholars and students interested in the history of ideas, culture, technology and science. The conference is also relevant to all professionals interested in climate issues and conceptions of nature. Interested museum visitors will also find that the conference elaborates on the issues raised by the exhibitions at Statens Museum for Kunst. In addition, the conference is aimed at people interested in contemporary art, current affairs like the climate crisis, and the historical approach to the field of art, nature and technology.
The conference is being organized by Associate Professor Maria Fabricius Hansen, dr. phil., and Professor Jacob Wamberg, dr. phil., from Aarhus University, and the conference and the exhibition Nature strikes back are linked in a collaboration between the conference organizers and the curators Hanne Kolind Poulsen and Henrik Holm from Statens Museum for Kunst.
Maria Fabricius Hansen and Jacob Wamberg take part in the interdisciplinary research network “Art, Nature, and Technology”, which has formed the background for the conference theme.
The conference is being supported by the Bikuben Foundation and the Aarhus University Research Foundation.