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Media Release

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For immediate release
September 29, 2005

Refresh! — live Web streaming of global conference begins today

Over 200 scholars and artists from 23 countries and five continents will meet in Banff today to explore the history of media arts at the turn of the millennium. Refresh!, the first international conference devoted to the histories of media art, science, and technology, runs September 28 to October 1 at The Banff Centre.

The reach of Refresh! will be extended through virtual participation across the globe via Web conferencing with ZKM Institute in Germany and with Itau in Brazil. In addition, locations across Canada and in Europe will set up audience viewing locations for the conference’s live Web stream, including the Emily Carr School of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, Transmediale in Berlin, Germany, the Goethe Institute in Toronto, Canada, Studio XX in Montreal, Canada, and Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Germany. Refresh! goes live at www.ceebanff.ca/stream beginning at 8:30 a.m. MST today.

Hosted by the Banff New Media Institute, Leonardo / ISAST, and the Database for Virtual Art, the conference will examine the relationship between new media and the disciplines of art history, anthropology, computing sciences, media studies, and other intercultural contexts. The conference coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI).

“We are at a point and time when the notion of new media needs careful reflection and analysis,” says Susan Kennard, director and executive producer, BNMI. “This moment represents, to borrow a phrase from Alvin Toffler, the first wave of media arts drawing to a close and the beginning of the second wave. We must acknowledge the history of new media and, at the same time, continually connect to newness, nimbleness, innovation and the next generation of discovery.”

Refresh! will feature the inaugural Rudolf Arnheim lecture, delivered by Sarat Maharaj from Goldsmiths College, London. The lecture honours the crucial role of Rudolf Arnheim in the history and theory of the interaction of art, science, and new technologies. Born in 1904, Arnheim contextualized the emerging medium of film and the new art movements in evolving and original research in psychology and visual perception, and he is pre-eminent among the theorists who have developed an understanding of the new art emerging from interactions between science and technology.

Other keynote speakers include Paris-based theoretician Edmond Couchot and São Paulo-based semiotics professor Lucia Santaella. Honorary and advisory conference board members include Rudolf Arnheim, Itsuo Sakane, Peter Weibel, Gunalan Nadarajan, Andreas Broekmann, Diana Domingues, Jean Gagnon, and Frank Popper. The conference is directed by Kennard, as local conference organizer, and by Oliver Grau, director of Immersive Art & Database of Virtual Art, professor of Bildwissenschaft and dean of cultural studies, Danube University Krems, Austria.

Refresh! coincides with several 10th anniversary celebrations of the Banff New Media Institute, including The Art Formerly Known as New Media exhibition at the Walter Phillips Gallery and the publishing of Euphoria and Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues, 1995-2005, a retrospective of previously unpublished presentations from the works of BNMI.

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For more information on Refresh! or to register as a member of the media, contact: