Athens, Ga. – Edward Shanken, a leading scholar of interdisciplinary new media art, will deliver a lecture on Feb. 15, at 4 p.m. in room 171 of the Miller Learning Center at the University of Georgia. The event is hosted by UGA’s Ideas for Creative Exploration, an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts with additional support from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.
Shanken is the author of Art and Electronic Media, a survey published in 2009. In his lectures, he weaves together the histories of art, science and technology and urges audiences to think beyond the traditional boundaries of the arts. His wide-ranging lecture at UGA will be titled “From the Space Race to the Telematic Embrace and Beyond: A Research Trajectory.”
Shanken earned masters and doctoral degrees in art history from Duke University after receiving an MBA from Yale University. He is a researcher in the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Media Art History faculty at Donau University in Krems, Austria. He was formerly executive director of the Information Science + Information Studies program at Duke University, an interdisciplinary program that studies new information technologies and their impact on art, culture, science, commerce, society and the environment.
In 2003, he edited a collection of writings by artist Roy Ascott titled Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. His introductory essay for that volume, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” received honorable mention in the Leonardo Award for Excellence. His work has been published extensively in book chapters, journals and exhibition catalogs, and he presents lectures at conferences and institutions around the world.
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information about Edward Shanken, see http://artexetra.wordpress.com. For more information about the UGA ICE program, see http://ice.uga.edu/.
