*CFP* "EMERGING MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE TOURIST ENCOUNTER", SPECIAL ISSUE, TOURISM GEOGRAPHIES JOURNAL

This special issue examines practices, meanings and impacts of emerging media technologies: digital, mobile, geo/locative and augmented reality technologies within tourism geographies. The special issue aims to situate emerging media technologies within processes of the production and transformation of space, spatial knowledge and social relations within the tourist encounter. We ask contributors to the special issue to consider: What are the configurations of different technologies involved with tourist experiences? In what ways do emerging media technologies shape tourism imaginaries and experiences? What are the particular cultural inflections in the relationship between digital and tourist practices? How do broader infrastructural and economic conditions shape the relationships between digital and tourist practices?

Papers in this special issue will explore the unfolding contexts of media, digital and emerging technologies in tourism geographies across breadth and depth and may include the following topics:

• Culturally and geographically situated explorations of digital practices in tourist sites (including empirical investigations into travel photography, virtual reality headsets, online travel writing, and travel vlogs) 

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, I INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF CINEMA AND FILM ANALYSIS

I International Symposium of Cinema and Film Analysis (Online)

17-19 November 2021

 

We are delighted to invite proposals from academic researchers to be presented at the I International Symposium of Cinema and Film Analysis; organized by the CNPq research group CineArte – Cinema, Film Analysis, and Intellectual Experience. The event will be held online from 17-19 November 2021, and our goal is to deepen and broaden the exchange between research works centered on film analysis by gathering different perspectives, observing the outcomes when selecting different theoretical approaches and methodologies, and seeing how film language can be intertwined with numerous fields of study.

We are interested in the moving image studies, sound, film analysis definitions, case studies, changes throughout the time, and debates centered beyond movies, such as the interchange between other fields of study within the Arts and Human Sciences. The Symposium is a result of an interdisciplinary exchange between researchers who investigate the relationship between cinema, audiovisual, by selecting film analysis as a methodology within different usages and contexts. 

*CFP* "COMPOSITE IMAGES", ISSUE 7, TRANSBORDEUR: PHOTOGRAPHIE HISTOIRE SOCIÉTÉ

What if the history of photography was ultimately less a history of recorded images than a history of images composed from recorded elements? The rise of assemblages and hybridisation practices in digital cultures prompts us to ask this question. What we today call memes juxtaposes elements that are willingly heterogeneous and whose contrast typically produces satirical effects. In another realm, we notice the proliferation of automatic image generation software that synthesises and combines real or fictional elements with a strong photorealistic charge, sometimes using deep learning technologies. Between these two poles, there’s a need to examine the wide range of practices which overturn the idea of photography as a capture of the real.

These shifts in the notion of photography are not, however, solely due to the rise of digital technology. They draw on a long history of the composite image that we intend to develop in the 7th issue of the journal Transbordeur. Talking about composite images rather than “photomontages” allows us to turn away from a narrative influenced mainly by the twentieth-century avant-gardes (Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism), and to broaden our point of view beyond the field of art. The modern Western discourse using the industrial metaphor of the mechanical assemblage of pre-existing elements does not cover all the ranges of photographic manipulation.

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, I INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE VISUAL MOTIFS OF POWER AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

I International Conference Visual Motifs of Power and the Public Sphere

Universidad Pompeu Fabra

20 & 21 September, 2021

 

 

There is a significant tradition of studies on political iconography inspired by the central figure of Aby Warburg, which is continued on through Erwin Panofsky, Horst Bredekamp, Monica Centanni, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Patrick Boucheron, as well as the aforementioned Carlo Ginzburg. His emphasis on the central role played by visual motifs in the construction of public space converges with the investigations carried out by a large number of theorists from other fields, such as theory and art criticism (Boris Groys, Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki), political philosophy (Giorgio Agamben), film studies (Nicole Brenez, Alain Bergala, Emmanuelle André), photography theory (Ariella Azoulay), social semiotics (Theo van Leeuwen), cognitive iconology (Ian Verstegen) and production studies (Banks, Caldwell, Du Guy, Thompson, and Burns), all of which pay attention to the levels of awareness and control over the images produced, whether in film and photojournalism, in the praxis of TV documentaries and reports or in online productions.

*CFP* "IMÁGENES Y SONIDOS DE LAS GEOPOLÍTICAS URBANAS", Nº 24-2022, REVISTA FOTOCINEMA

El cine y la fotografía han conformado y siguen conformando un imaginario colectivo a través de las imágenes urbanas que desde sus inicios han estado presentes en el celuloide. Las ciudades son escenarios y protagonistas de los metrajes (CAPARRÓS, 2013), se convierten muchas veces en espacios museísticos y en ocasiones llegan a identificarse con espacios a modo de “parque temático”, según la elección de escenarios. Las imágenes urbanas que los cineastas y fotógrafos han recogido en sus obras, han condicionado a menudo nuestra percepción de la ciudad (CAMARERO, 2013: 6), captándolas desde ángulos muy diferentes y con voluntades muy diversificadas: desde las city symphonies como reflexiones complejas sobre las relaciones entre la vanguardia, el cine y la ciudad (GAUTHIER, 2015: 54-55; HUESO, 2013) hasta los escenarios de la imaginación que albergan utopías y distopías, pasando por escenarios recreativos y retratistas de las revoluciones urbanas, lugares costumbristas, destruidos o en construcción, enclaves de conflictos bélicos y de avances cosmopolitas, espacios de una metamorfosis que es signo y significado de la acción (cf. CAMARERO, 2013). Existen muchos tipos de ciudad, tantos como interpretaciones puede tener la propia urbe si nos atenemos a “la mirada del cine” y a las multiplicidades plásticas que en tanto que objeto tiene, como “espacio de modificación”, en el propio cine y en la arquitectura. Pero las ciudades son también contenedores espaciales de eventos geopolíticos (SCHWERTER, 2017: 8): sus calles, sus monumentos, su arquitectura moderna y antigua, la presente y la que ya no se conserva, la efímera y la que perdura; lo material que convive con lo intangible pero no por ello menos definidor del espacio, lo que no se ve, pero se escucha: la palabra, el sonido; aquello que se percibe y se vive: los actos recurrentes… 

*CFP* "CRISIS / REPRESENTING, ENDURING, PROVOKING", 1ST ISSUE, IN VIVO JOURNAL

In Vivo is a bilingual online platform (French and English) specialized in multidisciplinary research on contemporary artistic creation, with an (almost) exclusive preoccupation with Performing Arts (theatre, choreography and dance, circus, performance art, opera) and Cinema.

Given the hybridity of contemporary artistic forms, In Vivo intends to host reflections on the written arts (literature, comics, biographies, etc.) and non-cinematic visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, installations, etc.) notably in their imbrication with the performing scenes and screens.

In Vivo contains 5 clusters, differentiated according to the methodology and the field of expertise to which they are respectively attached: Aesthetic(s), Philo-Performance(s), Humanities, Queerness, Pluralities.

In addition, a special section called Dialogue(s) is exclusively dedicated to interviews with scholars, artists, and practitioners of the Performing Arts and Cinema.

*CFP* "MACHINE VISION IN CONTEXT: POLITICS AND PRACTICES OF COMPUTATIONAL SEEING", SPECIAL ISSUE, PHOTOGRAPHIES JOURNAL

This special issue will bring together interdisciplinary scholarship that engages critically with the evolving, recursive interrelations between machine vision and photography.

The heightened capacities of machines to ‘see’ and visually categorize the world have been the subject of numerous recent journalistic exposés and public outcry. Whether critiquing the role that machine vision plays in efforts to track, detain, and penalize targeted communities, or charting the incorporation of similar technologies into urban infrastructures, self-driving cars and ‘smart’ appliances, there is a growing awareness that it is reshaping what is seen and what counts as seeing. Online, recognition algorithms increasingly automate the tasks of tagging, categorizing and extracting meaning from the “unmanageable and unassimilable” accumulation of images circulating across networked environments (Henning 2018). Within this context of volume, scale, and distributed production, the photographic image appears to have receded from the realm of human perception (Zylinska 2017), working instead as an ‘operative’ agent (Hoelzl & Marie 2015) that drives and draws together the constellation of hard and soft platforms that comprise the contemporary mediascape (Dvořák and Parikka 2021; Mackenzie & Munster 2019). Images and their audiences are being ‘put to work,’ as the solicitation and generation of metadata as well as the non-human recognition of pixel- and user-based patterns facilitates the improvement and expansion of computerized vision (Sluis 2020).

*CFP* "VISUALIZING CLIMATE CRISIS", NEW ISSUE, VISUAL STUDIES JOURNAL

Visual Studies Journal in collaboration Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool invite thematic and illustrated essays in traditional format (6-8,000 words) that critically and conceptually examine how we come to see, understand, and respond to climate crisis. 

By foregrounding the visual as an optic to better understand and examine these pertinent and timely issues, we welcome proposals that examine:

• How artists, activists, communities, and institutions deploy the use of photography and visual culture as a way of understanding the past, present and future impacts on communities, audiences, and people around the globe.
• Specific works of art and art practices that either historically or contemporaneously explore issues of climate crisis.
• Critique the role and relationship between galleries, museums, institutions and issues of climate crisis, advocacy, and education.
• Climate migrancy, the history of land and water management, food, and agricultural processes and/or the impact of food, clothing, and electrical consumption in relation to climate crisis.
• Food, biodiversity, recycling, land and water use, climate and race justice, architecture, non-human animals, and alternative energy sources as issues related to the climate crisis, either negatively or positively.

*CFP* LLAMADA A PARTICIPACIÓN, I CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL FOTOCINEMA

I Congreso Internacional Fotocinema

29-30 de septiembre y 1 de octubre

Universidad de Málaga

 

El I Congreso Internacional Fotocinema. Cultura, memoria y recuerdos visuales, acogerá en la Universidad de Málaga los días 29 y 30 de septiembre 1 de octubre de 2021 investigaciones de distintas disciplinas alrededor de dos ejes: la fotografía y el cine.

En esta primera edición nos centraremos en estudios vinculados a la cultura, la memoria y los recuerdos visuales. No en vano, los estudios sobre la memoria han experimentado un notable desarrollo en las últimas décadas, configurándose un amplio abanico que pasa por la posmemoria, la rememoria, la posmemoria familiar, la afililiativa, la memoria visual colectiva, etc. asociados normalmente a los Memory Studies. Estos análisis parten de una memoria en primera persona (autobiografías, autorretratos, diarios), pero también las de segundas y terceras generaciones en la transmisión de los recuerdos.

*CFP* CALL FOR PARTICIPATION, FEAR 2000: HORROR UNBOUND ONLINE CONFERENCE

Fear 2000: Horror Unbound

(Online) – 10–12 September 2021

 

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and 80-minute panels to be presented at the fifth Fear 2000 conference, Fear 2000: Horror Unbound. Hosted by staff in the Department of Media Arts and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University, this online conference will investigate the increasingly transmedial nature of horror in the twenty-first century.

Established in 2016, Fear 2000 is dedicated to championing work on contemporary horror. Previous events have showcased research from established scholars, early-career researchers and postgraduates focused on cinema, television, animation, video games, music and digital literature. But this has provided only a limited sense of horror's increasing presence in all aspects of popular culture; for our fifth conference, we aim to broaden our scope further and encourage papers that discuss and theorise horror across a wide range of media, including (but not limited to) film, television, theatre, performance, animation, art, photography, music, radio, podcasts, video games, digital media, comic books and literature.

*CFP* "THE UNDEAD CHILD: REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDHOODS PAST, PRESENT, AND PRESERVED", BOOK CHAPTER

In a new study on representations of children and childhood, we are seeking essays that explore the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child. The undead in popular culture commonly refers to the living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation and decay. For our purposes, undeadness is a broad concept that explores how people, objects, customs and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. When undeadness is applied to the child, an array of interpretive possibilities emerge. These might include nostalgic texts exploring past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood (hair, teeth, clothes, art and craft, games, photographs, audio and video recordings), images and artefacts of deceased children, as well as states of arrested development and an inability or refusal to embrace adulthood.

In our application of undeadness, we seek essays that explore attempts at countering the transitory nature of childhood. We believe that such an approach will enable deeper exploration of the parameters of childhood, including the theoretical viability of the child as a key social construct, as well as the ways innocence is itself a redundant concept that nevertheless maintains cultural currency. While the focus of this collection will not be horror, submissions from contributors writing in the field are welcome, with the understanding that our purpose is to expand undeadness beyond the realm of horror while acknowledging its roots in the genre.

*CFP* "REFLECTIONS ON FASHION DESIGN AND MEDIA. SYNERGIES BETWEEN FASHION AND THE MEDIA ARTS", BOOK CHAPTER

CICANT is a Research Centre where both solid theoretical work and rigorous applied research at the cross-section of media, society, literacies, arts, culture and technologies is developed. Critical to its research mission are knowledge creation activities that are oriented towards expanded research on two main subject areas. In CICANT those areas are organised in Research and Learning Communities (ReLeCo).

The research group on Media Arts, Creative Industries and Technologies (MACIT) is focused on the socio-cultural and artistic uses of media technologies (visual, performative, photographic, cinematographic and sonic) at the intersection with the creative industries, both from a historical and contemporary perspective. The group has a robust research in the field and fosters a media practice-based artistic research in several areas and with a long and solid track on them.

In this sense, we open a call for Chapters for the 1st volume of the series Reflections on Fashion Design and Media with the subtitle “Synergies between Fashion and the Media Arts”.

*CFP* "DIFFICULT DEATH: CHALLEGING CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF DEATH, DYING AND THE DEAD IN MEDIA AND CULTURE", EDITED COLLECTION

You are invited to submit 300-word abstracts for the forthcoming edited collection provisionally titled Difficult Death: Challenging Cultural Representations of Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. The interdisciplinary collection seeks to examine a range of representations of and engagement with death and dying across different media and cultural forms including film, television, new media, journalism, performing arts and literature. With a media and cultural studies focus, the collection will examine some of the difficulties and challenges of representing death, dying and the dead whilst also exploring ‘difficult’ and ‘challenging’ representations of these subjects as important objects of analysis in themselves. We welcome contributions from all disciplines and approaches and from those working within and beyond academia.

Context

Death and dying are difficult to avoid both in the global media and in popular culture. At times the representation of death, dying and the dead can be especially challenging for viewers. Yet at other times it can offer solace, escapism, or provoke engagement with mortality. Penfold-Mounce (2018) has examined how different popular cultural texts can promote both ‘safe’ and ‘provocative’ morbid spaces for engagement with death and the dead. For those who create cultural texts, ranging from novels to journalism to film and television, how to engage with and represent death, dying and the dead also represents particular challenges. 

*CFP* "HABITUAL NEW MEDIA", ISSUE Nº 55, 2021, JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS AND LANGUAGES

“What it means when the media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving.”

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in ``Updating to Remain the Same (MIT Press, 2016), argues that our media “become more important when they appear to be of no importance - when they move from the 'new' to the ‘habitual’”. Technologies such as smartphones are no longer surprising to us, they have been absorbed into our lives in such a way that “we become our machines: we transmit “live”, update, capture, share, connect, save, delete and track” (from the introduction).

Chun interprets the incorporation of social networks in our habits as a defining concept of the present. “Networks have been central to the rise of neoliberalism, replacing 'society' with groups of individuals (...) Habit is central to the inversion of privacy and advertising that drives neoliberalism and networks”. It is in this field, for example, that Natalie Bookchin's artistic work expands individual expressions that embody this paradoxical intimate exposure in the visual digital flow.

*CFP* "LITERARY AND ARTISTIC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND THE US", BOOK CHAPTER

Vernon Press invites book chapters to be included in a forthcoming scholarly volume on Literary and Artistic Connections between Latin America and the US.

In spite of the often-unfavorable political relationship between Latin America and the US, artists and writers have always managed to transcend conflicts, establishing friendships and connections, as revealed in their works, cultural exchanges, and in associations such as international book fairs, multilingual poetry festivals, and the PEN Club. The intertextual dialogues of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the poets of the Beat Generation, for instance, not only reflect what Harold Bloom called ‘the anxiety of influence’ but also a symbiotic sharing of historical perspectives, literary movements, techniques, and approaches.

This volume aims to examine the intertextual and interpersonal relationships between US and Latin American artists and poets and the commonalities reflected in their works.

Possible contributions include (but are not limited to):

*CFP* "GLOCAL STREET ART. PLACES, IDENTITIES, NARRATIVES", INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

"Glocal Street Art. Places, Identities, Narratives" International Symposium. The University of Rennes 2 (France) will hold the international symposium on February 24, 25 and 26, 2022. A special session for young scholars will take place on February 24. We invite proposals for paper presentations in English or French (duration: 20 minutes). No payment from the authors will be required.

Unauthorized works of art in the public space are often ephemeral and changing. The transience of such works is primarily the consequence of their underground nature, exposing them to be torn apart or removed by the legal owners of the space. The transient character of this art is also related to its exposure to passers-by and to harsh weather conditions, causing peeling and fading. While most works are created for a given location and can then be considered site-specific, their photographic images–spread widely on the Internet or social media by artists and aficionados–are off-site. This phenomenon has benefited from fast-developing virtual data storage (blogs, websites and social media) and the continuing evolution of camera technology in smartphones. It is certainly reinforced by the drive for conservation and the sense of heritage which both characterize contemporaneity, as Jean Michel Tobelem claimed when he noted that the growth of museums is a “major trait of our times”. Yet, the pictures of the works are not the works and that is even truer in the case of street art, which is characterized by its transient, fragile nature. The way pictures of street art are stored in new virtual museums is thus problematic. 

*CFP* "URBAN ASSEMBLAGE: THE CITY AS ARCHITECTURE, MEDIA, AI AND BIG DATA", A HYBRID IN-PERSON AND VIRTUAL CONFERENCE

 Urban Assemblage: The City as Architecture, Media, AI and Big Data 

University of Hertfordshire

28-30 June 2021

London / Virtual / Hatfield, UK

 

he role of computers in the design, control and making of the public life [and space] is increasingly dominant, their presence pervasive, and their relationship with people characterised by a growing complexity. Batty 2017

This conference is planned as a hybrid in-person and virtual event. The keynote will be held in London. In-person presentations will take place in the University of Hertfordshire campus in Hatfield on the outskirts of London.

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, ISSUE 39, LA VALLE DELL'EDEN / EAST OF EDEN: JOURNAL OF CINEMA, PHOTOGRAPHY, MEDIA

For a long time, screenwriting has been largely ignored by film scholars, in Italy as well as in other countries. Film Studies have been – and partially still are – dominated by an auteur-centered approach, where the only relevant figure of the cast & credits is the director. But in the seventies, thanks to seminal books such as Pauline Kael’s The Citizen Kane Book (1974) – recently “rediscovered” because of David Fincher’s Mank (2020) – and Richard Corliss’ Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (1974), things started to change. In Italy, the widespread influence of the politiques des auteurs had joined forces with the Rossellinian-Fellinian distrust – not to say contempt – toward the screenplay and the professional figure of the screenwriter. It is not a chance that, in Italy, when research in this area finally started, it avoided directly addressing the Italian screenwriters. The first important Italian scholarly books and essays were devoted to screenwriting in general (Giuliana Muscio’s anthology Scrivere il film, 1981), or to classical Hollywood screenwriters (Guido Fink’s essay on Samson Raphaelson, 1994). In the last twenty years, a new generation of film scholars has produced a series of stimulating, well researched books and essays on Italian screenwriting and screenwriters, from the silent years to the present (among others, see: Federica Villa, 2002 and 2010; Silvio Alovisio, 2005; Maria Pia Comand, 2006; David Bruni, 2011). Today, Italy has a significant production of studies on screenwriting in the Italian cinema. But of course there are still many unaddressed questions. For example, there is no systematic study, based on archival research, devoted to the scripts of the “commedia all’italiana”, a genre where writing plays a very relevant role. There are no studies on the big Italian directors conducted through the perspective of their collaboration with a screenwriter (i.e. Luchino Visconti and Suso Cecchi D’Amico).

*CFP* "THE PHOTOGRAPHER", Nº 6 ISSUE, REVELAR: JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGE STUDIES

REVELAR – Journal of Photography and Image Studies is open to works for volume no. 6 (2021). This edition, dedicated to «The Photographer», will publish works in the following modalities:

• Scientific papers
• Reviews (on books, essays or photography exhibitions)
• Photo-essays (open to both amateurs and professional photographers)

Inspired by the title of an unavoidable work on photography, Le Photographique: pour une théorie des écarts, by Rosalind Krauss (1990), we propose a discussion on the Photographer and the photographic discourse they instigate. Thus, the sixth issue of REVELAR is dedicated to: «The Photographer».

From alchemist to scientist, chemist to optometrist, amateur to professional, technician to artist, the photographer has redefined how the world is seen and shaped for the past 200 years. Perhaps it is significantly owed to them the construction of the strange concept, «visual culture», so often used.

*CFP* "BOOKS ON SCREEN", SYMPOSIUM 2021 OF LEEDS AND ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITIES

Books on Screen

University of Leeds and Anglia Ruskin University

November 3rd, 2021

Online

 

The codex has long asserted itself as an indication of its owner's sophistication and status. Codex display under pandemic conditions has highlighted the complexities of presenting books on screen; we have become increasingly aware of the importance of book materiality through online discussions centred on #BookshelfCredibility and #PandemicBookshelves, which draw attention to the shelves lurking in our Zoom backgrounds. Such backdrops, like bookish tableaus on BookTube, Bookstagram, and other social media spaces, have invited scholarly examination of curated book displays. But this study of books on social media – books as a component of self-presentation – can be complemented by a broader study of books on screen: representations of the book in films, television, photography, game and other screen worlds. Indeed, books have long been featured on screen: the comic book in a-ha's iconic 'Take On Me' music video (1985) blends into reality; the magical tome in Myst (1993) transports gamers to a mysterious island; rare books are the stars of the recent film American Animals (2018). No matter the electronic medium, the physical form of the codex continues to assert itself as prop, metaphor, and plot device.