*CFP* "ARTIFICIAL CREATIVITY", SPECIAL ISSUE, Nº 36, TRANSFORMATIONS: JOURNAL OF MEDIA, CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY

Special issue of Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture and Technology, in collaboration with Medea research lab, Malmö University, Sweden. Guest editors are Dr. Bojana Romic and Dr. Bo Reimer, Malmö University, Sweden.

This special issue (#36) of Transformations entitled “Artificial Creativity” aims to stir a discussion about the cultural, societal, and ethical aspects of robots or AI engaged in creative production.

Machines engaged in creative activities can be traced back to Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automata The Writer and Musical Lady (1770s), which involved calligraphic writing and the performing of music respectively. In the 1950s, Jean Tinguely’s Méta-matics produced generative artworks, in response to the long-standing questions about the role of the artist.

Most recently, a number of artworks have featured robots that draw (Robotlab), paint (Moura), or make music (Weinberg, 2020). It has been announced that the 10th Bucharest Biennale in 2022 will be “curated” by Jarvis, an AI system created by Spinnwerks, Vienna (FlashArt, 2020).

*CFP* "CHEN QING LING/THE UNTAMED", BOOK CHAPTERS

We are soliciting book chapters for an edited scholarly collection on Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed, its contexts, and its audiences. This will be a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary collection that considers the show's popularity, influences, and effects from a variety of cultural and critical viewpoints.

After episodes began airing on Tencent in June 2019, Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed quickly became one of China's most widely-viewed and highest-earning dramas, attracting millions of views per episode and drawing a large international audience through streaming on additional platforms. Over a year later, the show continues to release new paratextual materials, support a vibrant transnational and transcultural fan base, and generate wider, ongoing interest in genres such as danmei, xianxia, and Cdramas. Given these effects, this collection aims to assemble a first compilation of interdisciplinary scholarship that begins to contextualize, explore, and evaluate Chen Qing Ling/The Untamed, the genres and works that inspired it, the contexts that impacted it, and the influences it continues to have.

We are interested in chapters that address topics such as:

*CFP* "LATINX REPRESENTATION IN POPULAR CULTURE AND NEW MEDIA", EDITED VOLUME

We invite chapter proposals from scholars based in Europe whose work delves into the issues, configurations, and manifestations of the representation of Latinxs and the Latinx experience in popular culture and new media. The aim of the volume is to collect research on the diverse sociocultural, contextual, and aesthetic aspects intertwining in the production of Latinx self/representation. Issues related to the expression and depiction of Latinx subjectivity have entered the public sphere with renewed force in recent years. On the one hand, grassroots and online campaigns have organized against whitewashing, colorism, stereotypes, anti-immigrant nativism, racist policing, Black/Brownface practices, and cultural commodification. On the other hand, a lively, powerful, stimulating, and diverse popular culture has been flourishing as Latinx popular culture has progressively spanned genres and media, reconfiguring them from a more inclusive perspective. 

Moreover, mainstream production compan+ies have attempted to expand their reach by targeting the Latinx audience, albeit with mixed results. We are looking for essays that consider these broader contexts while focusing on the Latinx presence in popular culture—both as creators involved in the production process and as narrative subjects—in film, (web) TV series, genre fiction, comics and graphic narratives, popular music, and new media. We expect proposals to cover matters related to minority heritage, such as resistance to assimilation, loss and reinvention of cultural roots, and the creation of cultural safe spaces.

*CFP* "AMERICANS IN VIENNA: 1945-1955", THE CENTER FOR AUSTRIAN AND GERMAN STUDIES 2021 ONLINE CONFERENCE

Americans in Vienna: 1945-1955 Conference

27th-28th April, 2021

Online (Zoom)

 

The Center for Austrian and German Studies (CAGS) at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies are inviting submissions for an April 27-28 2021 (online) conference, focusing on the varied presence of Americans in Vienna during the first decade after the Second World War. Papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Austrian-American History. The occupation and administration of Austria after the Second World War by the armies of the Allied victors and the division of Vienna into four zones of occupation paralleled arrangements in Germany. But although we know a lot about Cold-War espionage, monetary reforms or the workings of military administration in postwar Berlin, accounts centered on Vienna seem invariably drawn to Orson Welles and The Third Man, while the approaches of older scholarship, such as the edited volume Österreich unter alliierter Besatzung 1945-1955 (Böhlau, 1998), deserve a fresh look. Arguably, Vienna not only fueled foreign imagination more than Berlin at the time, but its quadripartite division and Austria’s successful financial reforms informed the Allied practices that followed on foot in Germany.

*CFP* "MUSLIMS IN INDIAN CINEMA", EDITED VOLUME

Critical articles on the representation of Muslims/Islam in Indian films are invited from research scholars/faculty members for the upcoming volume "Muslims in Indian Cinema" to be edited by Md Sarfaraj Nawab and Asrin Khatun.

Cinema is one of the most popular mediums to connect a huge audience under the same roof. In India, folks have a secured emotion, love and dedication for movie-going. Beside entertainment, films have catered to the sense of a connectedness between people across states in India. Presentation of myriad cultures has always been an important motif in Indian cinema considering the diverse nature of lifestyles, faiths or existence of the people. And the consumption of an alien culture by a comparatively large concourse can possibly be imagined only through the silver-screen. Thus, cinema in India plays an important role in the presentation of certain culture, sect or faith. People feed on such presentations and shape their views about the subject. By keeping all these factors in mind, it is important now to address the Muslim Question in Indian cinema in such a time as this when a new and changing notion of India is on the rise. Where do we present the Muslims in the New India vis-à-vis their presence in the past? 

*CFP* "MEDIA PERFORMANCE & SOCIAL INCLUSION", ICA PRECONFERENCE 2021

ICA Preconference 2021: Media Performance & Social Inclusion

Sponsored by the Journalism Studies Division & the Political Communication Division

May 27, 2021, 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EST

Virtual conference (platform: Cadmore – same platform as used for the ICA main conference)

 

During the Covid pandemic it has become extremely clear that public communication may do both: contribute to the inclusion of people in a diverse society or amplifies the disintegration of society into groups serving particular interests. The preconference therefore aims at intensifying the discussion on media performance, initiated by two ICA preconferences in 2016 and 2017, but considering the main theme of ICA 2021, it will focus on how media should act to support the inclusion of people in a diverse democratic society, and how media actually act.

*CFP* "AUDIOVISUAL TRANSLATION IN THE AGE OF STREAMING", SPECIAL ISSUE, TARGET JOURNAL

This special issue of Target will investigate the role of translation in the rapidly changing and developing environment of global media streaming. While there have been calls to ‘recenter globalization’ since the early 2000s (e.g. Iwabuchi 2002), since the late 2000s the development of streaming media has effectively disrupted older linear flow patterns of film and media distribution and consumption. There is now globally more access in translation to what had been marginalised cultures in the global media ecology, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Nigeria. 

In turn, these so-called marginalised cultures in the global media ecology, which had been previously largely dominated by Hollywood, now enjoy wider access in translation to media cultures which had been much less explored or ignored in their home cultures: Korean audiences having a greater access to Danish, German, and Spanish media, for instance. Streaming service platforms turned content creators such as Amazon, Netflix and Rakuten Viki are in the process of overturning previous understandings of the global mediasphere and accelerating the dynamics of the media landscape, enabling contraflow of media content and de/recentering understandings of global media production. Increasingly invested in international services, streaming companies’ practices fragment, deconstruct and reconfigure media space.