*CFP* "OPORTUNITIES FOR INNOVATION", IMMERSIVE STORYTELLING SYMPOSIUM

Immersive Storytelling Symposium: Opportunities for Innovation

2nd and 3rd November 2021,

Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, UK, and online

 

A huge amount of R&D talent is focused on the global immersive technology market, which is estimated to be worth $95-105 billion by 2023. In the United Kingdom the Creative Industries Sector Deal draws on £72 million government funding to support this new wave of innovation. The national network of Creative Industries Clusters includes XR Stories (York), StoryFutures Academy (London) and XR+D (Bristol and Bath). The Audience of the Future demonstrator programme is producing unique experiences spearheaded by renowned cultural institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company, Natural History Museum and Royal Opera House. These initiatives are designed to establish the UK’s position in an international marketplace that encompasses everything from Dreamscape Immersive’s location-based VR attractions, to Museum of Ice Cream’s multi-sensory installations, to Punch Drunk’s immersive theatre shows. Just this small selection of examples is spread across the USA, Singapore, Dubai and China.

*CFP* "THE AUDIOVISUAL THINKING PROCESS IN CONTEMPORARY ESSAY FILMS", ISSUE 18 (SPRING 2022), COMPARATIVE CINEMA JOURNAL

Born out of modern cinema, the essay film departed from the dominant forms of fiction and documentary cinema in order to explore an unknown territory defined by subjectivity, hybridization and reflection, evolving to become “a form that thinks,” as Jean-Luc Godard defined it. The final decades of the 20th century witnessed the consolidation of the essay film, which was enabled by postmodern thought and culture, as well as by the development of video recording technology. In this mode, works by Chris Marker, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonas Mekas, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders, Guy Maddin, Peter Watkins, Chantal Akerman, Alexander Kluge or Johan van der Keuken, among many others, developed a practice of audiovisual thinking for which Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) could be considered the epitome, marking a turning point that also took place at the century’s end. Over the last twenty years, this essayistic practice has proliferated due to the digital revolution, facilitating diverse experiences of subjectivity and intimacy, and multiplying the possibilities of audiovisual editing; that is, of the very thinking process that defines this filmic form. Taking this itinerary into account, the 18th issue of Comparative Cinema proposes to address the specificities of the audiovisual thinking process in the contemporary essay film.

The most notable studies devoted to the essay film have established its key traits – the audiovisual expression of the thinking process and the self-reflexiveness of subjectivity – and its specificities – issues related to its genealogy, historical path and bond with the literary essay – allowing for the consolidation of this research area. Several edited volumes have been decisive in this regard, including: L’essai et le cinéma (Liandrat-Guigues and Gagnebin, 2004); La forma que piensa (Weinrichter, 2007); Jeux sérieux. Cinéma et art contemporains transforment l’essai (Bacqué et al., 2015); and Essays on the Essay Film (Alter and Corrigan, 2018). 

*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* "PAINFUL TRUTHS AND UNSPOKEN WORDS: REMEMBERING GENOCIDES AND THE HOLOCAUST IN DIFFERENT GENRES AND REGIONS OF THE WORLD", SPECIAL ISSUE, GENEALOGY JOURNAL

Initial world responses to the Holocaust included the declaration “never again” (Gilbert, 2000; Reese, 2017; Herman, 2018; Power, 2013). This Special Issue on “Remembering Genocides and the Holocaust” invites contributions from different fields, such as the film, music, museums, and literature. Contributions may explore specific representations in their own right or the relationship between representations and lived experiences pertaining to genocide/ holocaust. They may focus on how remembrances of Holocausts and Genocides have been transformed over time, including, but not limited to the globalization, nationalization or privatization of such memories. The following may help illustrate the scope of the Special Issue but are not intended to limit the choice of topic:

• Overview: how have portrayals of Holocausts or Genocides changed in response to the activities of political movements or advocacy groups; who decides official labels and categories, including the role of community representatives; issues of societal acceptability of representations; the different conceptual bases in which such representations are grounded and the historical, social, and political underpinnings of such changes, etc. 

*CFP* "LGBT+ VISUAL ARTS AND POLITICS IN ROMANIAN CINEMA", SPECIAL ISSUE, EAST EUROPEAN FILM BULLETIN

With a penal code (article 200) inherited from the Ceausescu regime, which criminalized same-sex relationships, and which was only repealed in 2001 as a way for the country to enter the European Union, Romania remains a largely traditional society regarding LGBT+ rights. However, customs and mores are slowly changing thanks to political, legal as well as artistic fights. Audiovisual art has substantially contributed to this change. Films such as Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (2012) or Olteanu’s Several Conversations about a very Tall Girl (2018); installation and video art, pioneered by artists such as Sorin Oncu, are prime examples of Romania’s emerging queer art. Showing such films in Romania often causes quite a stir. Campillo’s 120 Beats Per Minute had one of its screenings interrupted by a Romanian Orthodox movement in Bucharest, exemplifying a divided society struggling with its communist past and the state of capitalist democracy. This also poses the question of what type of LGBT+ culture Romania can put at the forefront, whether through western European/American films, or domestic productions.

‘In an increasingly less tolerant context which led to the recent ban of gender studies in Romanian universities, such an issue is more than warranted.

*CFP* "TRAUMA AND NIGHTMARE", 4TH INTERNATIONAL INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

4th International Interdisciplinary Conference

Trauma and nightmare

(Online)

 

“Trauma” and “nightmare” have become the most popular metaphors of evil in our times. The old philosophical discussion about “the nature (or mystery) of Evil” has been replaced by modern (and postmodern) studies on trauma. Nightmare is a more and more frequent phenomenon, and it is being studied by dream and sleep researchers. However, nightmare means not only bad dream – today this term describes also a variety of unpleasant experiences, memories, emotions, so it deserves special attention as an important factor which characterizes human condition.

*CFP* "AFTER DOUGLAS CRIMP", ISSUE 33, INVISIBLE CULTURE: AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR VISUAL CULTURE

For its thirty-third issue, InVisible Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that engage with the legacy of Douglas Crimp (1944-2019). Douglas was foundational to InVisible Culture and its institutional home, the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. The first issue of InVisible Culture included his essay “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” in which Douglas used Warhol’s gayness as an interpretative hinge while also advocating for the importance of cultural studies’ contributions to art criticism. Besides his profound influence on art scholarship, Douglas’s pedagogy reverberates through the work of those he taught and mentored in various academic and art institutions. We invite contributors to reflect on the myriad ways in which Douglas’s legacy impacts the pasts, presents, and futures of art history and cultural criticism.

Throughout his career, Douglas made crucial contributions to art theory, queer theory, and cultural studies. In 1977, Douglas curated the seminal exhibition Pictures at New York’s Artists Space, which established him as one of postmodern art’s major interlocutors. He continued to spur critical engagements with art institutions and postmodernism with his many essays in October and his 1993 book On the Museum’s Ruins. During the rise of the AIDS crisis, Douglas turned to what he called “cultural activism”; his writings later collected in Melancholia and Moralism (2002) helped galvanize a generation of queer activists.

*CFP* "NEW THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND EDUCATION", THEMATIC NUMBER, COMUNICOLOGIA JOURNAL

The public-health crisis caused by Covid-19 accelerated the process of migration towards online technology and the digital restructuring of social relations – notably concerning work and affective relationships. Thus, not only the structural deficiencies in accessing technologies of digital information and communication (TDIC) but also a deficiency in technological literacy itself were evidenced in an unprecedented way. This acceleration in the use of TDIC, combined with the growing social and political discredit of scientific research, as well as the economic crisis, require a renewed intellectual effort in the light of theoretical and methodological perspectives that dare to radically re-articulate the relations between media, culture, technology, and education.

In this sense, the thematic number of Comunicologia “New theoretical perspectives on culture, technology, and education” invites the submission of articles with a robust theoretical component which propose to analyze:

*CFP* "RE-EXAMINING SCIENCE COMMUNICATION: MODELS, PERSPECTIVES, INSTITUTIONS", SPECIAL ISSUE, JOURNAL OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

Science communication continues to develop and change, as a discipline, practice and professional career path, with significant growth in both professional practice and academic study. Changes in the relationships between science and society and its increasing inclusion in official discourses have opened new opportunities for dialogue and collaboration. At the same time, this may have produced challenges for the authority of science, which can be openly contested, negotiated and transformed in public arenas. This transformation of the relationships between science and society has been fundamentally intensified by the digitalization of the media landscape. New media have increased the diversity of actors using, sharing and generating science content, their communication practices and the strategies they use.

These changes affect the working practices of scientists, R&I stakeholders, science communicators, journalists, museum/events mediators, and other practitioners whose engagement with science/science communication is rapidly evolving. What are the (new) roles that scientists, science communicators and institutions could or should play in this emerging landscape? Such changes also impact how citizens relate to science and science communication. How do different publics perceive, trust and rework messages and engage with science in a vast landscape that may include misinformation about science?

*CFP* "FANDOM HISTORIES", SPECIAL ISSUE, TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS AND CULTURES

Fans demonstrate a broad interest in the past, both of their objects of fandom and their own communities. They collect, catalog, preserve, restore, and publicly display historical artifacts and information in their own archives and museums. They study archival materials and collections, interview witnesses, and read historical scholarship, developing historical narratives and theses. Their research materializes in the form of analog and digital nonfiction media such as print and online publications, documentaries, podcasts, video tutorials, and pedagogical initiatives. Through their work, fans historicize their own fandom and tie it into broader historical questions, connecting to issues like heritage, gender, and the nation. While some fans do this as community historians, focused on small and self-financed groups, others work within large and well-known cultural organizations and businesses, bringing this work into the mainstream.

The goal for this special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures is to explore the question of how fans produce knowledge about the past and actively engage with history. We are particularly interested in essays that show what fans do as historians, such as running publicly accessible archives and museums, and using archival materials for the production of nonfiction media. We want to shift direction from the question of why and how fans are collecting to analyses of why, how, and with what impact fans are creating and disseminating knowledge about the past. Such contributions will further our understanding of how central engagements with the past are to individual and collective fan identities, and how fandom connects to historical debates.

*CFP* "ON INMERSIVITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, CARTE SEMIOTICHE: INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL ON SEMIOTICS AND THE THEORY OF IMAGES

With the advent of digital technologies, the term immersivity is gradually spreading. This lemma, which finds its root in the Latin mergĕre, to plunge, refers to the experience of a body completely enveloped by an environment, thus accounting for the shift from a purely spectatorial dimension to an immersive relationship to images  (Eugeni 2018).

The immersive effect calls into question the genealogical dimension of the media and the aesthetic experience elaborated within the history of the arts and images. The relationship between devices such as Smart Glasses and VR and the pre-cinematographic optical instruments, cannot be reduced to an evolutionary principle. Both the stereoscope (Crary 1990) and the panorama (Grau 2003), for instance, are examples of immersive strategies in the 19th century; and they share with the most recent technologies the problem of a «channeled aesthetic perception» (Montani 2014). Likewise, trompe-l’oeil painting and 3D cinema, baroque chapels and contemporary durational performances, raise questions related to the simulacrum of continuity between the space of the spectator and the space of representation. New technologies conceive an aesthetic experience in which every distance between subject and object seems to collapse.

*CFP* LLAMADA A PARTICIPACIÓN, I CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE COMUNICACIÓN ESPECIALIZADA EN LA SOCIEDAD DE LA INFORMACIÓN

I Congreso Internacional de Comunicación Especializada en la Sociedad de la Información

Facultad de Ciencias de la Información

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

25 y 26 de Noviembre de 2020

El periodista especializado se halla entre las fuentes expertas, protagonistas de la noticia, por un lado, y las audiencias interesadas en determinados contenidos, por otra. Para informar a los ciudadanos sobre los mecanismos del mercado o de la administración de Justicia; para contarles los descubrimientos de las ciencias o los fichajes de los clubes deportivos siempre ha sido necesario, en efecto, un profesional que entienda lo que hacen y declaran las fuentes, por un lado; y capaz, al mismo tiempo, de divulgarlo entre personas que, no teniendo una particular formación en esas materias, las siguen con particular interés y tratan de conocerlas y comprenderlas para estar a la altura del tiempo en el que viven.

*CFP* "CULTURAL POLICY AND CULTURAL DIPLOMAZY", THE YOUNG RESEARCHERS CONFERENCE

The Young Researchers Conference on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diplomacy

Istanbul Bilgi University

9-10 July 2020

The Young Researchers Conference on Cultural Policy and Cultural Diplomacy organised by Istanbul Bilgi University UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Cultural Diplomacy will be held on 9-10 July 2020 in Istanbul.

Founded in 2017, Istanbul Bilgi University UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Cultural Diplomacy aims to enhance the international cultural cooperation and dialogue, protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions, produce capacity-enhancing programmes to support participatory cultural policy-making, and support the existing international network in this field. In line with its objectives, it carries out academic works with the Cultural Policy and Management Research Centre (KPY), which publishes the Cultural Policy Yearbook in Turkish and English annually.

*CFP* "DOCUMENTACIÓN FOTOGRÁFICA", MONOGRÁFICO, REVISTA DOCUMENTACIÓN DE LAS CIENCIAS DE LA INFORMACIÓN

La revista Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información profundizando en su interés por analizar los temas relacionados con la Documentación y los medios de comunicación dedica este próximo número a la Documentación Fotográfica, tanto en su papel tradicional como en los nuevos escenarios digitales, así como aquellas cuestiones relacionadas con la difusión del patrimonio fotográfico. Además, como es habitual en la revista, hay una sección miscelánea donde se incluyen otros artículos relacionados con la documentación en los medios.

La consideración de la fotografía como patrimonio es relativamente reciente si establecemos la comparación con otro tipo de bienes; por otra parte, es lógico porque su antigüedad apenas alcanza los dos siglos, desde su presentación oficial en 1839. El artefacto fotográfico ha evolucionado en sus procedimientos y soportes conformando un corpus de documental tan rico como interesante que requiere de una reflexión sobre su gestión, metodología y criterios de tratamiento así como sus usos y aplicaciones en contextos diversos. En 2015, el Plan Nacional de Conservación del Patrimonio Fotográfico fijó como objetivo prioritario la urgente necesidad de la recuperación y tratamiento de los fondos y colecciones.

*CFP* "NARRATIVE ARCHITECTURES. BODIES, SPACES, TECHNOLOGIES IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA EXPERIENCE", SPECIAL ISSUE, IMAGO: STUDI DI CINEMA E MEDIA

Media have always been able to configure our sense of space. However, in recent years, technological development—which tends to affect the relationship between the individual and the environment more and more deeply—has been radically intensifying this process. More particularly, the spatial dimension has assumed a role of increasing importance in determining the subject’s activity and agency.

Two types of experiences appear particularly interesting in this regard. Those of the first type, which are more immediately relevant to the field of media studies, tend to delocalize the user in non-empirical worlds through the use of immersive devices. Virtual reality—in its varied range of applications and levels of interactivity, ranging from pure contemplation to video ludic interaction—is an effective example of such “heterotopic” spaces.

The experiences of the second type, which are only apparently not related to the field of the media, explicitly reconfigure the relationship between the body of the subject and the material space. Transit through urban spaces, frequenting stores and shopping centers, visiting an exhibition or a museum, enjoying tourism and theme parks, mass events or shows, and so on, are today mediated experiences, not only in their content but in their own conditions of existence.

*CFP* “COLONIAL, ANTI-COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL MUSEUMS, COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS”, SPECIAL ISSUE, LUSOPHONE JOURNAL OF CULTURAL STUDIES

The encounter between audiences and art objects, in a specific space, has a long and complex history. It is a hermeneutical challenge, which changes over time, in accordance with the needs of the epoch and the objectives of each society and culture. In this encounter between art, time and audiences – which is both complex and fleeting – museums, collections and exhibitions project different representations of the world and narratives of the lives of human communities, which observe the standards of a wide array of different, and often conflicting, curatorial strategies.

Museums, collections and exhibitions are always regulated by political and programmatic objectives and are therefore open to multiple interpretations. Museums, collections and exhibitions always observe a regime of truth, regardless of whether they are founded by nation states, or by revolutionary or counter-revolutionary forces, and whether they are in support of the established regimes, or aim to alter the established order. This regime of truth is the core condition for the possibility of representations that a specific community makes of itself and its epoch, while also formulating possibilities of meaning in order to help us understand what it means to be human.

*CFP* “MUSEOLOGY”, FIRST ISSUE, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MUSEUM STUDIES

The International Journal of Museum studies is born in Italy in 2020 in a moment of great theoretical vitality of Italian museology, but also of identity crisis of world museology. The birth of an Italian national museum system and the process of accreditation of museums in progress impose, beyond short-term choices, a total revision of the models of museum management sustainability, but also a rethinking of their mission and their relationship with the publics in a society in constant, even swifter change.

The magazine presents itself as a showcase of the theoretical debate in Italy in a constant comparison with the international museological reality and as an observatory of the most stimulating best practices to allow a wide-ranging debate that takes into account the local and national specificities and its interfacing with the different international realities.

*CFP* "MOBILITIES ON SCREEN", CHAPTER BOOK

This edited collection aims to capture the way human mobility is represented on screen (any type of screen: cinema, television, museum or public displays, tourist information, urban advertising, mobile devices etc). The project is based on the premise that human mobility is a major defining aspect of contemporary life, that mobility has become the paradigm of being and creating in the world, one that affects not just the creative industries and traditional media content and consumption, but also everyday life and banal practices and engagements with screen media.

For the purpose of this collection mobility is conceptualized as both movement and connection/disconnection. Mobility would refer in this instance to the liquidity of contemporary life, migration, media spreadability, communication growth, transmediality, networking, activism, cosmopolitanism, travel and tourism etc. Papers that apply or provide a theoretical update of globalization, post-colonialism, cosmopolitanism, tourism, place-making, network theory, transmedia production and consumption, prosumer theory, and diasporization, are particularly welcome. Equally, innovative methods of capturing mobilities on screen are invited. We expect authors to provide contemporary screen media examples which represent human mobility, but also illuminate creative industry contexts and practices, as well as inform our understanding of prosumer and fandom performance. In particular, the contributions should make it clear how the case study captures various expressions of change, transition, in-betweenness, liquidity, travel, fragmentation, remaking and connecting. Case studies are not limited to any geographical region.

*CFP* "DARKROOMS AND REPRESENTATIONS: HISTORIES OF PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM AND EXPLORATION", CONFERENCE

Darkrooms and Representations: Histories of Photography, Film and Exploration Conference.

2nd - 3rd April 2020. National Maritime Museum, Royal Museums

Greenwich, UK.

Keynote Speakers: Geir Kløver (Director, The Fram Museum), Dr Lawrence Napper (Senior Lecturer, King’s College London), Bryony Dixon (Curator of Silent Film, British Film Institute).

The role of photography and film has often been relegated to that of illustration, yet its uses - as a visual record, in scientific research, education and travelogues – have been varied and at times ingenious. From experimentation with technologies in extreme environments (telephoto lenses, glass plate negatives, flashlight photography, chrono-photography, photomicrography, cinematography) to the practices that have emerged through ethnographic studies, meteorology, astronomy, oceanology, cartography and the documentation of wildlife, the mediation of photography and film has made otherwise inaccessible geographies visible. Yet, this ‘window’ on to the world is constructed, it is made using materials and techniques which tell a story: from a physical trace of the environment to a record of scientific and cultural practices. 

*CFP* "SLICES OF EVERYDAY LIVES", CONFERENCE

Slices of Everyday Lives

19th and 20th September 2019

Department of Architecture and Newnham College, University of Cambridge

Convenors:

François Penz (Cambridge)

Janina Schupp (Cambridge)

Suzanne MacLeod (Leicester)

Maureen Thomas (Lillehammer/Oslo)

Andong Lu (Nanjing)

£110 (delegate)/ £55 (student)

Visual Culture, especially cinema, has produced an unprecedented archive of audio-visual records of everyday domestic practices in diverse cultures, constituting a highly valuable resource for the study of lived spaces. This conference will explore how the comparative analysis of visual culture artefacts, from paintings to fiction films, can contribute to our understanding of everyday life practices in homes around the globe.