Date: 26-27 November 2016

Venue: Watershed, Bristol

Overview

Introduction to Media and Classics (Office document, 16kB)

The Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition was delighted to host Media and Classics, a two-day, international conference at the Watershed, Bristol. The conference asked us to reconsider what role media have (new and old, material and spiritual, perceptible and imperceptible) in the formation and reproduction of Greco-Roman arts, and, more broadly, in what might be called the transmission of ‘classical’ culture.

One of the most complex and multifaceted case studies in the history of media in the West yet to receive systematic examination has to do with the arts of ancient Greece and Rome. The processes of production and reception of the arts of Greece and Rome are still perceived in ways that remain at once too narrow and too broad: on the one hand they are dominated by the agency of long-dead artists or ever-changing audiences; on the other hand they are dominated by abstract ideas – the continuities of the Classical Tradition, the discontinuities of Reception, the cosiness of ‘conversing’ with the past, or the rather nebulous qualities of textuality and visuality.

Revisiting Martin Heidegger’s provocative claim that ‘the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes’, this conference focused attention on the cultural history of the material conditions and technical and technological practices that give shape to artistic creativity and make possible its transmission as ‘classical’ and as ‘culture.’ 

List of speakers:

• Pantelis Michelakis (University of Bristol): 'Introduction: Classics, Media Histories, Media Theories'
• Till A. Heilmann (University of Bonn): 'The Allure of the Ancients: on Kittler and the Greek Alphabet'
• Frank Haase (University of Basel): 'Metaphysics as Media Philosophy'
• Duncan Kennedy (University of Bristol): 'The Mathematical Diagram: Between Historicity and Metaphysics'
• Ulrich Meurer (University of Bochum): 'The Shards of Zadar: On the Rationale of (Meta-) Media Archaeology'
• Verity Jane Platt (Cornell University): 'Lost Wax: Fugitive Media and the technê of Transmission'
• Ika Willis (University of Wollongong): 'Saxa Loquuntur: Stone, Voice, and the Roman Telephone'
• Genevieve Liveley (University of Bristol): 'White Noise: Transmitting and Receiving Roman Elegy'
• Maria Oikonomou (University of Vienna): 'Manteia, Mediality, Migration'
• Ellen O’Gorman (University of Bristol): 'The Classical Text and the Chance Encounter'
• Shane Butler (Johns Hopkins University): 'The Mask of Dante'
• Wolfgang Hagen (Leuphana University Lüneburg): 'Ethos, Pathos, PowerPoint: On the Epistemology and (Silicon Valley-) Rhetoric of Digital Presentations'

Image: Hermes in the Louvre. Photo courtesy of IWCphoto on Flickr.