Event Host: Department of History of Art
Short Description: This graduate student conference explores the notion of the interface in art across wide-ranging media and time periods.
This graduate student conference explores the notion of the interface in art across wide-ranging media and time periods. Artists from all periods have engaged critically with such encounters between viewer and object via windows, thresholds, mirrors, doors, frames, screens and other such interfaces. Though interfaces often impact the viewing experience, we aren’t always conscious of their presence. This conference draws attention to the interface and the various ways it facilitates the viewer’s engagement with an object. In investigations, scholars will demonstrate the interface’s essential role in shaping the object’s meaning and function.
Scholars understand the interface as any division or conjunction of two or more effects, entities, or spaces. Artists from all periods have engaged critically with such encounters between individuals and objects via windows, thresholds, mirrors, doors, frames, screens, etc. Though interfaces often impact the viewing experience, we aren’t always conscious of their presence. In later periods the interface becomes perhaps most integrated with daily life through new media, such as electronic technology. This graduate student conference seeks to demonstrate the interface’s essential role in shaping the object’s meaning, function, or reception. As such, the conference interrogates the interface and the various ways it facilitates, mediates, or disrupts the viewer’s engagement with an object or transmission of information.
Keynote speaker on Friday at 5:30 p.m., Professor Kate Mondloch, University of Oregon
Panels on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
All events are free and open to the public.
Visit the Department of History of Art for more information.
Image rights: René Magritte, Euclidean Promenades, 1955, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Minneapolis, Minnesota.
