Re-Create 2015, the sixth international Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology will mark the 10th Anniversary of the Re conference series. Re-Create 2015 is devoted to exploring what theories, methodologies and techniques can be used to understand past, present and indeed, future paradigms of creative material practice involving technologies within research contexts from a historical and critical point of view.

The title Re-Create is an abbreviation for the term “research-creation”, part of a growing international movement which goes by many names: “practice-led research,” “research-led practice,” and “artistic research,” among others.

While the link between research and practice seems to be a new horizon, the media-based arts have long been at the intersection of the humanities, sciences, and engineering and present a critical site in which to take up the changing relationships between knowledge, power, and economy.

Research normally signifies modes of acquiring new knowledge that coherently and systematically advance a field and is grounded and validated by both social frameworks (peers) and existing bodies of knowledge. Similarly, research in conjunction with material practice demands that making be historically, theoretically and methodologically framed and valorized.

Re-Create 2015 seeks to interrogate the historical entanglement of research and making within a wide and diverse set of international sites, disciplines and contexts: from non-institutional creative research initiatives driven by artists and designers in the streets, to the labyrinths of industry funded research labs and universities. From unknown or ignored histories of research-based practices in Latin America, Asia and Indigenous communities to government funded initiatives, the conference will thus critically explore the ongoing and productive tensions between theory, method and making in the histories of media, art, science and technology.

Potential contributors to the conference should focus thematic panel sessions or individual papers on one of the following areas of concentration:

Lab Studies: Studies on how artists and designers have historically worked in industry, universities and collective, grass roots-based research environments
Curatorial Actions and Practices: How have research paradigms historically entered into curatorial practices and how have they been framed, exhibited and articulated?
Anti-institutional research: Historical profiles of non-institutionally based research-driven explorations.
Theoretical Frameworks: How have theoretical paradigms in media, art, science and technology historically evolved structuralism in the 1960s or media studies to current work in affect theory, media archaeology, critical post-humanist approaches derived from STS, appropriation and remix aesthetics, feminist new materialism, queer and postcolonial studies, enactive and distributed cognition?
Methodologies: What can methodological tools emerging from the human and social sciences like ethnography, historiography, archaeology, genealogy and other qualitative techniques provide to the historical and critical positioning of practice?
Interdisciplinary Intersections and Impacts: Exploration of the formation and rise of interdisciplinary research fields (image science, sound studies, science studies, sensory studies, environmental studies) and their impact on the construction of media art histories.
Digital Humanities: What is the historical relationship between the digital humanities and the histories of media, art, science and technology?
Sites: How historically have sites of research and practice in media art, science and technology evolved outside of the predominant spheres of Europe and North America and what forms have they taken?


Conference Program The conference program will include competitively selected peer-reviewed individual papers, panel presentations and poster sessions as well as a number of keynotes and invited speakers and a parallel satellite program of events with Hexagram partners including core cultural institutions in Montreal. In the interest of maintaining a concentrated conference program, there will be a series of plenary sessions as well as accompanying poster sessions. Each of the plenaries as well as the poster sessions will mix together scholars and practitioners representing different cultural perspectives. The conference will be held in English and French, with live translation.

Call for Proposals Re-Create 2015 welcomes contributions from researchers, artists, designers, scholars and technologists working across diverse disciplines, sites and practices. We particularly encourage scholars and creators from international contexts outside of Europe and North America.

About the Context and the Host The conference will take place in Montreal hosted by Hexagram, the international network for media, art, design and digital culture (http://hexagram.ca). It is the largest network of its kind in Canada and one of the largest internationally dedicated to research-led creative practices. Ten years after the inaugural Re-Fresh conference at the Banff New Media Institute in 2005, the return of the conference to Canada and specifically to Quebec, offers a pertinent context to address the evolution of research in the histories of media, art, science and technology (http://www.mediaarthistory.org/mah-conf-series).The conference will be held across the two core Hexagram sites at Concordia University and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The venues are within walking distance from each other, centrally located in vibrant, downtown Montreal – the digital arts and culture capital of North America.

Submissions 250 word abstracts of proposals, panel presentations and posters should be submitted in either Text, RTF, Word or PDF formats. Texts can be submitted in French and in English. The DEADLINE for submissions is December 7, 2014. Submitters will be informed by mid February 2015. INFORMATION about the submission process and general information can be found at: Re-Create Submission Site

Conference partners include Media@McGill, CIRMMT-McGill, Cinémathèque québécoise, DHC-Art, Elektra/ACREQ, Goethe-Institut Montreal and others to be announced.

Conference chairs and Hexagram Co-Directors: Chris Salter, artist, Concordia University Research Chair and Associate Professor, Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University (QC/CA/US/DE) and Gisèle Trudel (QC/CA), artist and professor, École des arts visuels et médiatiques, Université du Québec à Montréal.

Re-Create 2015 Local Organizing Committee: Thierry BARDINI, Barbara CLAUSEN, Ricardo DAL FARRA, Jean DUBOIS, Jean GAGNON, Alice JIM, Jason LEWIS, Jonathan LESSARD, Louise POISSANT, Chris SALTER, Cheryl SIM, Jonathan STERNE, Alain THIBAULT, Gisele TRUDEL, Marcelo WANDERLEY Re-Create 2015

Re-Create 2015 International Advisory Board: Marie-Luise ANGERER, Monika BAKKE, Samuel BIANCHINI, Georgina BORN, Andreas BROECKMANN, Annick BUREAUD, Michael CENTURY, Joel CHADABE, Dooeun CHOI, Ian CLOTHIER, Sarah COOK, Nina CZEGLEDY, Sara DIAMOND, Diane DOMINGUES, Jean Paul FOURMENTRAUX, Sébastien GENVO, Orit HALPERN, Jens HAUSER, Denisa KERA, Felipe César LONDONO, Natalie LOVELESS, Glenn LOWRY, Rafael LOZANO-HEMMER, Roger MALINA, Sally Jane NORMAN, Nicolas NOVA, Jussi PARIKKA, Christiane PAUL, Simon PENNY, Andrew PICKERING, Sundar SARRUKAI, Yukiko SHIKATA, Michel VAN DARTEL, ZHANG Ga, Ionat ZURR

Re-Create 2015 Local Programming Committee : Sandeep BHAGWATI, Jean-Claude BUSTROS, Mia CONSALVO, Thomas CORRIVEAU, Mario CÔTÉ, Louise DÉRY, Tagny DUFF, Joanne LALONDE, Thomas LAMARRE, Paul LANDON, Éric LETOURNEAU, Krista LYNES, Erin MANNING, Brian MASSUMI, Marc STEINBERG, Jonathan STERNE, Mark SUSSMAN, Kelly THOMPSON, Eldad TSABARY

MAH Honorary Board: Douglas DAVIS, Jasia REICHARDT, Itsuo SAKANE, Peter WEIBEL MAH

Conference Series Board: Sean CUBITT, Oliver GRAU, Linda HENDERSON, Erkki HUHTAMO, Douglas KAHN, Martin KEMP, Machiko KUSAHARA, Tim LENOIR, Gunalan NADARAJAN, Paul THOMAS


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Montréal, 5-8 November 2015


Re-Create 2015 will mark the 10th Anniversary of the International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology. 
The conference will be hosted by two Hexagram sites at Concordia University and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), core antennas of the largest network dedicated to research-based creative practice in media art, design and technology. The venues are centrally located in vibrant, downtown Montréal – the digital arts capital of North America.

The conference returns to Canada since the inaugural event Refresh! in Banff in 2005 to reflect on and re-examine topics of driving concern that have continually arisen at the previous MAH editions in Berlin (2007), Melbourne (2009), Liverpool (2011) and Riga (2013). The entanglements among practice, theory and method within media art, design, science and technology are increasingly critical to academic and cultural milieus. Concurrently, the inclusion of artistic disciplines involving technological-cultural instruments, concepts and methods is increasingly supported internationally by granting agencies and policy bodies. This has facilitated the emergence of practice-driven research paradigms, along with questions of method, validation, opportunities and problematics that such paradigms imply. Hence, Re-Create 2015 proposes the central question of what theories, methodologies and techniques can be used to understand past, present and indeed, future paradigms of creative material practice involving technologies within research contexts, from a historical and critical point of view.

The concept of “research-creation” in Québec and later Canada at the end of the 1990s put forward an integrated model of theory and practice, as well as experimentation and creation in which the interpretive disciplines (humanities and social science) are linked together with the creative ones (art and design). For twelve years, Hexagram, the interuniversity Centre for Research-Creation in Media Art, Design and Technology is an ideal site to focus on the question and impact of research-creation in the histories of media art, science and technology. Its researchers are internationally recognized for developing methodological and practice-based strategies and are actively contributing to the role of interdisciplinary research frameworks in Canada and abroad.

The conference will have three streams: theory, method and practice. It will embrace the intercultural and interdisciplinary connections between media studies, film studies, art, design, art history, computer science, science studies, philosophy, cultural studies, human geography, anthropology, sociology and music, among others, and these disciplines impacts on the development of media art, science and technology.

Program Chair: Dr. Christopher Salter, Co-Director, Hexagram; Associate Professor Design and Computation Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University

Co-Program Chair: Gisèle Trudel, Co-Director, Hexagram; Professor,

Faculté des Arts, Université du Québec at Montréal

Partnering institutions:

McGill University (Media@McGill)

CIRMMT- Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music and Media

Technology