Call for Papers, Theme Issue: "Musical and artistic mediations"

Abstract

Music and Arts in Action (MAiA), a refereed, multidisciplinary journal, invites submissions for a thematic issue examining mediation in music and other performance, visual and literary arts, to appear in volume 5(1), 2012. By mediation, we mean the various forces that shape or structure how art products are produced, transmitted and experienced by their consumers. As demonstrated by scholars of actor-network theory, objects themselves play active roles in their own mediation by affording unanticipated opportunities for engagement. Artistic mediation may take place through technologies (e.g., of musical production/consumption), in situations (e.g., dance classes) and during processes (e.g., of artistic creation, editing or critique). Artistic mediation also operates on individual and collective levels, ranging from personal performance styles, to discourses (e.g., of art history), to organizational aesthetics (e.g., of performing spaces). Taken together, mediation comprises personal, social and material processes that implicate objects, emotions, bodies, gestures, spaces, institutions, languages, social networks and other actors.