Greetings from Omaha!

First I must apologize for letting so much time pass between posts – but that’s life, always getting in the way of things!

Anyways, I’ve been here in Omaha since Wednesday for the Midwest Art History Society’s annual conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska at Omaha. We’ve been in some great spaces - the Joslyn Art Museum yesterday and the Kaneko space and Bemis center for contemporary arts today. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the large amount of great artwork I’ve seen in each of these spaces. It’s also been a great conference. This morning I chaired a panel (my first panel!) entitled “Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: How Artwork's Scale is Affected by Infinite Reproducibility.” The three panelists, Diane Mullins (Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota), Jordan Cleland (Purdue University) and Todd Jokl (University of New Haven) all did a great job contributing to this theme. Since I didn’t see any of you there, here is the panel abstract:

Walter Benjamin's seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction became the basis of much of the 20th century's discourse surrounding the effects of reproduction on the concept of originality in artworks. Now in the 21st century we enter the age of digital reproduction that, while seemingly similar to mechanical reproduction, is inherently different. Mechanical reproduction allowed for the concept of the “copy” which conversely implied an “original.” In digital production, there is no original, only data – data that can exist in infinite replication. Almost 50 years after Benjamin, Paul Virilio writes of Dromology, or the science of speed, and the ability of technology to compress distance, space and time. Digital production eradicates the limitations of distance, space and time by the very nature of binary data and lossless reproduction. This lossless reproduction capability creates an environment where imagery can be reproduced identically not only in one location, but simultaneously anywhere in the world.
How does this lossless/spaceless aspect of the digital medium affect the production of artwork?

The conference is over tomorrow but I will be traveling to Montreal to catch the tail end of the Northeast Modern Language Association conference to present my photo series, The Land of Sunshine in a panel entitled Postmodern Tourism on Sunday. As fun as MAHS has been I’m now looking forward to my first presentation on The Land of Sunshine (not including the sneak peeks at the MacMurray and UIS galleries back in December).

Photo by: shannonpatrick17