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--------------------------------------------------------- Authenticity and Copy 20-21 March, 2003 Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) Amsterdam, The Netherlands The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) organizes an international symposium on the concepts of authenticity and copy, studied in relation to handwriting as a cultural practice in contemporary arts and media. Writing, in our communication society, at first sight appears to be a standardized, replicable, power-driven, or most recently electronic articulation that refers to a typewriter or a computer rather than to a "human hand." Handwriting, however, also occupies an important position. It is used in many diverse cultural practices, such as in different forms of (literary) writing, private correspondence, diary writing, urban graffiti, to name but a few. Handwriting, moreover, is not only generated by a "human hand," but also (re-)produced by new print and visual media-such as photography, (silent) film, microfiche, Xerox, fax, and the digital media. These new technologies situate handwriting in a new perspective and, thus, ask for a reinterpretation of handwriting. This symposium focuses on an aspect of handwriting that is dramatically challenged by mechanical and electronic reproduction practices: its claim for authenticity. Handwriting is traditionally regarded as an autography, as an un-exchangeable, unique and authentic "signature" that claims to guarantee the presence of an individual writer during a historically unique moment of writing. This claim for authenticity distinguishes handwriting from its cultural opposite, typed writing. The cultural significance of typed writing, after all, resides in its capacity to be allographic, that is, iterable and reproducible. The reproduction of an authentic handwriting, on the other hand, risks to be considered a forgery. This view on handwriting has a long tradition in different disciplines, most importantly in jurisprudence, but also in historical studies of original sources, and in art theory, where it delineates the status of the artist/author. Together with the technological development of the last century, the idea of the uniquicity of the signature has been challenged philosophically, most profoundly by Derrida in his famous essay "Signature, Event, Context" (1990). The idea of this symposium is to rethink the concepts of uniqueness and iteration, of authenticity and counterfeit of handwriting with regard to the practices of reproduction media. By addressing these concepts from different disciplines, this symposium aims at discussing the contradictions between different monodisciplinary views on the concepts of "authenticity" and "copy" and at making the gaps thus created productive for a more differentiated, interdisciplinary theory of handwriting. Contact: Universiteit van Amsterdam Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Spuistraat 210 1012 VT Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel.: +31 20 5253068 Fax: +31 20 5253580 Website: http://www.hum.uva.nl/ -- H-MUSEUM H-Net Network for Museum Professionals E -Mail: h-museum@h-net.msu.edu WWW: http://www.h-museum.net
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