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Archive: Spring 2001: Reproduction For an article from the UMass Campus Chronicle on the Spring 2001 seminar, click here. Our Spring 2001 seminar was on the theme of Reproduction. Even on the face of it, this is a theme that can be approached from various directions--genetic, legal, mechanical, cultural, technological--and that can be addressed in various locations and periods. From a biological or social point of view, how has reproduction changed in our century? What about the practicalities and/or ethics of cloning: is there such a thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reproduction? Or, from a different angle, how might reproduction relate to translation: how do principles of cloning and/or difference work there? How does the internet affect reproduction: of works of art, music, literature--or teaching? How do we judge the quality of a reproduction in relation to an original? Is performance--of music or drama--a kind of reproduction? What of copyright or patenting in a world of the internet and/or genetic engineering? How do political systems, or cultures reproduce, and with what effects? These were among the issues that prospective participants were asked to consider. The result was a highly energetic and productive seminar ranging from art and art history, to movies, to the political and literary discourse of reproduction, to the politics and ideology of communications systems, to the reproduction of memory in images and texts--and much more. The following were the participants of the Spring 2001 seminar on Reproduction, with a short description of their projects. Feel free to get in touch with any of them, should you have an interest in their work and/or specific project. Christine Cooper (Assistant Professor of English): The forms of agency generated by narratives of reproduction during the French revolutionary period. Contact Christine Cooper. Stephen Harris (Assistant Professor of English): The reproduction of Greece and Rome in Late Antiquity; forms of lineage and legitimacy in history and culture. Contact Stephen Harris. Susan Jahoda (Professor of Art): ‘Frictional Contacts and other Stories.’ I have been a practicing artist/photographer for the past twenty years. My approach has always been an interdisciplinary one; both in my choices regarding materials, and through my interest in linking conceptual knowledges from other fields of inquiry to my own art. Projects to date have included the production, exhibition, and publication of photographs, mixed-media installations, image/text pieces, book projects and performance art. Most recently I have been writing texts and producing photographs for a book called Frictional Contacts and Other Stories, and collaborating with another artist on a public art work to be installed in Gaeta, Italy, in September 2001. My seminar project will explore the complex ways in which memory, as an active process in the present, intervenes in the social, sexual, and historical constitution and reproduction of identities. Contact Susan Jahoda. Laetitia La Follette (Associate Professor of Art): The History of Art is taught exclusively from reproductions. Will the replacement of 35 millimeter slides by digital reproductions have much of an impact? Could the greater accessibility of digital reproductions change the teaching and learning of Art History in significant ways? Specifically, can digital technology help to connect the student with the work of art better than traditional media? Laetitia La Follette is interested in exploring with the seminar these questions as well as some of the challenges and pitfalls she and her collaborators are encountering as they develop an interactive digital supplement to existing art history textbooks. The federally-funded CD-ROM, ‘A History of Art for the 21st century,’ encourages students to spend more time looking at high-resolution, large-scale digital reproductions than is possible with traditional reproductions in slide or book plate form. An audio expert guides the student through a series of focused analyses, while a workspace (in progress) will allow him to develop his own art historical analysis, drawing on what he has seen, heard and read about the work. Contact Laetitia La Follette. Marty Norden (Professor of Communication): The circumstances surrounding the production, censorship and reconstruction of the 1917 movie Birth Control, created by and starring the renowned activist Margaret Sanger. Contact Marty Norden. Mari Castaneda Paredes (Assistant Professor of Communication): ‘The Commercial Reproduction of New Media.’ I am interested in examining the transition to digital television and the ways in which the historical conditions of commercial media are being reproduced in this new high-tech environment. My work on communications policy is an attempt to extend beyond the traditional policy rhetoric, and in its place, articulate an examination of how the intersection of politics, economics, technology, and art reproduces media as a social force. Contact Mari Paredes. Nina Scott (Professor of Spanish and Portuguese): The castas paintings of 18th-century Mexico as reproductions dealing with ‘reproduction’--of the racial spectra of the new world, for European consumption. Contact Nina Scott. Patricia Warner (Associate Professor of Consumer Studies): ‘Dressing the 18th Century: Costume for the Movies.’ Movie costumers can choose to reproduce an historical period exactly, they can suggest it by copying general silhouette but fudging details, or they can ignore the truth of historic costume entirely, choosing to redesign the period according on their own tastes, the director’s vision, and the period in which the movie is made. To a costume historian, each presents problems. Discussion will center on two versions of the same story, set in the 18th Century, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ and ‘Valmont.’ Contact Patricia Warner. For information on the continuing activities of the Reproduction seminar, click here. |