Swift Hall, 3rd floor lecture room,
1025 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

"The Arts of Transmission" is an interdisciplinary conference that will take place at the University of Chicago on 21-22 May 2004, in conjunction with a special issue of Critical Inquiry. The event calls together experts from a range of disciplines-- literature, sociology; anthropology; science studies, filmmaking, and more-- to examine relationships among ideas and cultures of communication past and present. Participants include Ann Blair, Roger Chartier, Lorraine Daston, Elena Esposito, Peter Galison, John Guillory, Friedrich Kittler, Alan Liu, David and Judith MacDougall, Gregory Nagy, Mary Poovey, and Janice Radway.

In keeping with the project's focus, "The Arts of Transmission" will be the first special issue available on Critical Inquiry's new online service, Rough Cut. This website www.journals.uchicago.edu/CI/journal/roughcut.html makes available preliminary versions of articles prior to their publication. Rough Cut pioneers for the humanities an approach that has already transformed communication in the sciences.

Rough Cut exemplifies one of the themes that "The Arts of Transmission" seeks to address. Our age is preoccupied with questions about the ways of creating, transmitting, and appropriating knowledge. "The arts of transmission" as Francis Bacon called them, are those essential practices through which ideas are articulated, distributed, and passed on to our successors. As we try to understand the most important changes in our culture—whether in the crisis of education, the fluctuating fortunes of the information economy, or the ambivalent exhilaration of the digital revolution-we find ourselves returning to these practices. Bacon's "arts" are as urgent a concern now as at any moment since the advent of printing.

One reason is that they have multiplied many times over, embracing not just oral, manuscript, and print communication, but also broadcast, electronic, and digital media. The time may be past when we could comfortably invoke discrete concepts like print culture or digital culture, because the ways in which these forms interact have also ramified. Today the arts of transmission intersect across technologies in ways we have still to understand and with consequences we have yet to confront. As a result, authorship, reading, the concepts of information and communication themselves-the basic terms in which we think about creative work are changing beyond recognition. Some aspects of this are relatively well known, such as the crisis of academic publishing and the bitter conflicts now raging over intellectual property. Others remain relatively unfamiliar. To understand our moment we shall need new perspectives, able to perceive common issues extending across otherwise deep historical, theoretical, and disciplinary rifts.

The conference organizers are James Chandler, Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor of English and director of the Franke Institute, Arnold Davidson, professor of philosophy, and Adrian Johns, professor of history, all at the University of Chicago.

For more information, please call the Franke Institute for the Humanities at 773.702.8274