Recent Symposia of the International Committee for the History of Technology, 2002-2004

During the past three years, the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) has held its annual symposium in Spain, Russia, and Germany. In June 2002, ICOHTEC met in Granada, Spain, at the invitation of Javier Goicolea, the Fundacion Juanelo Turriano, and the University of Granada. In August 2003 the venues were St. Petersburg and Moscow, and Vassily Borisov and the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University and the Institute of the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences played host. Wolfhard Weber, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum sponsored the society's thirty-first symposium in August 2004. In Granada, two hundred attendees participated in fourteen sessions featuring more than 175 papers; more than one hundred gathered in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and in Bochum, 120 historians, engineers, and architects participated. All three symposia attracted conferees from Europe and Russia as well as North and South America, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. Graduate students and eligible international members of SHOT were able to attend thanks to generous travel support from the Society for the History of Technology.

Thematic Sessions

One of the distinctive characteristics of ICOHTEC symposia is the expanded thematic sessions containing from five to twenty papers in panels grouped into hour-and-a-half time slots. This encourages wide-ranging discussion of the papers within the larger session themes, and over the past several years a number of ongoing conversations have blossomed.

Technology, Music, and Art

Hans-Joachim Braun (Germany) organized an expanded session on music and technology in Budapest in 1996, and he has continued organizing sessions on the general theme of technology and the arts for succeeding symposia. In Granada, "Creativity: Science, Technology and the Arts" focused on changes over time in processes of "cross fertilization" between the arts and technology. Panels in this session focused on general concepts and improvisation, redefinitions in music and the performing arts, and engineering and design in the fine arts. Notable papers were presented by Bernard Jim (U.S.A.), who discussed how the artists Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Rachel Whiteread attempted to subvert the spectacle of building demolition through site-specific sculptures; Susan Schmidt Horning (U.S.A.), who investigated how creativity as collaboration played out in American postwar recording studios; and David Kilpatrick (U.S.A.), who looked at how the incorporation of computer-controlled scenery has affected the performer's creativity in the modern theater.

In Russia, "Technology and the Arts (with special reference to Russia)" contained an eclectic group of twelve papers that were presented in panels in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Topics ranged from depictions of the iron industry in sixteenth-century Dutch painting (Michael Mende, Germany) to twenty-first-century interactive art (Julie Wosk, U.S.A.); in between were papers on technology and music, photography, architecture, literature, film and opera. Dimitri Bayuk (Russia) described the obscure invention of the Russian novelist Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, a split-key piano, while Karen Freeze (U.S.A.) vividly detailed the grandiose and creative use of light, sound, and staging in the Seattle Opera's production of Wagner's Ring Cycle. Other highlights included Guzel Krassilchtchikowa's (Russia) paper on the TsAG Complex of the 1920s and 1930s, Nikolaus Katzer's (Germany) exploration of technology and industrialization in Russian literature and cinema at the turn of the twentieth century, Oleg Adamov's (Russia) study of man and machine in VKHUTEMAS, and Hans-Joachim Braun's discussion of Russian constructivism. In all, these papers represented a truly international and interdisciplinary range of scholarship that appealed to specialist and novice alike.

For ICOHTEC's Ruhr-area sysmposium in Bochum, a session on "Technology, the Arts and Technological Landscapes" asked how technological landscapes are reflected in the arts and whether there is evidence that artists' visions of technological landscapes influenced the redesigning of those landscapes. Catrin Gersdorf (Germany), treating landscape as a spatial concept as well as a material reality, analyzed the American photographer Richard Misrach's "Desert Cantos," in...