WELCOME

Scope: Contemporary Research Topics (Art & Design) is peer-reviewed and published annually in November by Otago Polytechnic/Te Kura Matatini ki Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Scope (Art & Design) aims to engage discussion on contemporary research in the visual arts. It is concerned with views and critical debates surrounding issues of practice, theory, history and their relationships as manifested through the visual and related arts and activities, such as sound, performance, curation, tactile and immersive environments, digital scapes and methodological considerations. With New Zealand and its Pacific neighbours as a backdrop, but not its only stage, Scope (Art & Design) seeks to address the matters which concern contemporary artists and arts enquirers in their environments of practice.

Issues planned for 2013:

Kaupapa Kai Tahu 2
This issue of Scope, subtitled Kaupapa Kai Tahu 2, is on the one hand a showcase of Kai Tahu and other Iwi research at Otago Polytechnic and, on the other hand, an outcome of a growing relationship between the Dunedin School of Art at Otago Polytechnic and Kai Tahu and other Iwi staff and students in the School and wider afield in the larger institution.

Visual Archaeologies of Photography
Rosalind Krauss’ remark, in A Voyage on the North Sea, that it is “…the onset of higher orders of technology which allows us, by rendering older techniques outmoded, to grasp the inner complexity of the mediums those techniques support”, seems to have had a bearing on some contemporary practices in photography. To explore some of the conditions of contemporary photographic practice, we propose the topic Visual Archaeologies of Photography. Photography, like painting, has been frequently eulogized, and it has never been singular, either in terms of its social or technological functions; however, in recent practice, some photographers seem to have taken up the anachronistic tools of discarded photographic practices in order to deliberately reflect upon photography and its histories. Is this a sign of maturity, a developmental stage of a medium which has covered enough ground to have a history broad and deep enough to examine, to reflect upon? Is photography, the recording angel of modernity’s creative and destructive impulses, turning its lens upon itself, in fear of losing its own history to those same forces?

Papers and other contributions are invited on the topic Visual Archaeologies of Photography, which may include the discussions of following categories, or related topics:

• Photographic practice that observes, comments upon, or takes as an instrument anachronistic photographic technologies, for the purpose of examining the medium, its histories, and its future.
• Anthologies, monuments, and memorials to photography, archives and collections—whether created by artists, curators, or collectors.
• Nostalgia, romanticism, and the search for authenticity in photographic practice
• Attempts to preserve “hand knowledge”, the how-to, of photography, perhaps prompted by millennial anxieties.

Deadline for submissions 28 May, 2013