"Splendid Isolation: Urban and Rural Flows and Counterflows in Electronic
Music and Related Media"

February 10-12, 2005, Berlin, Germany

Held in conjunction with club transmediale.05 [BASICS]

The relationship between communication technologies and the city has been a
long and complicated one, where the density of communicative activity has
often been taken as defining characteristic of urban life. By contrast,
rural areas have been idealized and marked by the relative absence of these
technologies, a perception which tends to obscure the social and spatial
consequences of communication technologies in rural areas. Out of this
dichotomous set of associations has emerged a constellation of forces,
ideas, images and experiences which have defined both the city and rural
zones in unique and singular ways.The history of art and music bears many traces of this productive tension,
in which being immersed in city life and rural hermitage act as polar
opposites. Popular music has been identified with contrapuntal movements
that fluctuate between the celebration and derogation of both the rural and
the urban. Within this interplay, various technologies, in particular
electronic communication, have provided the principle forms of mediation
between urban and rural areas, bridging and binding people and places in
multiple ways and creating new hybrid territories situated within a shared
mediasphere. In this context, the challenges of cultural production in and
between rural and urban regions continue to be inflected by the specific
demands of electronic/digital production, distribution and consumption.

This conference intends to address topics relating to the many debates and
discourses produced by the intersection of cultural production, electronic
arts/media, and social relations in urban and rural settings. We encourage
artists, practitioners, journalists, writers and academics to participate in
what promises to be provocative conference. In keeping with the overall
themes of transmediale and club transmediale [BASICS], which investigate the
aesthetic and ethical foundations of a hyper-potential culture, papers
should address, but need not be restricted to, the following frameworks:

* (Exo/Endo)Polis: electronic music, urban/ruraldynamics, and cultural
politics

* Refashioning Networks: circuits, nodes,communities, scenes and subcultures
and extended milieu

* Mediations: the rural/urban digital nexus,imagining/ representing nature
in the city/the city in nature; electronicmusic and the experience of nature

* Counterflows: fluctuating movements betweenurban and rural music
subcultures

* The Best of Both worlds: bridging the urban/rural divide

* Splendid Isolation: productivity betweenseclusion, media networking and
boredom; sound cultures beyond the majormetropoles

* Perforating the Mainstream: marketing themargin

* Opposing Urbanity: f(r)actions of ruralsubcultures in the metropolis

* The City and Its Other: critiques from thecentre and periphery, speaking
from and to rural and urban perspectives

Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and are due by November 15,
2004. Panel proposals are also welcome.

Please submit them to:



Papers should be kept to 20 minutes, including audio and visual clips.
Please notify us at to what audiovisual equipment you will need.

Dr. Geoff Stahl

Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Schiffbauerdamm 19

D-10117 Berlin

Germany

Office Phone: +49 (30) 2093-3716

Fax: +49 (30) 2093-3726