Call For Papers
Rendering (the) Visible III: Liquidity
Atlanta, February 8-10, 2018
Deadline: October 20, 2017
Since the early 2000s, the idea of “liquidity” has been mobilized in discourses ranging from social theory to aesthetics, from informatics to architecture, to describe a new relationship with the networked environments of life within global capital. More specifically, within the study of moving image culture, we have seen an increasing turn toward affective relations, plasticity, resonances and flows, whereby images and sounds—no longer grounded in an analogical relation to the real—are seen variously as malleable, untethered, “viral,” or fluid.
The graduate program in Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University has, over the past several years, been exploring some of the implications of these ideas, specifically in relation to race, via our research group “liquid blackness.” Now, however, we wish to explore the ways in which the concept of liquidity might begin to chart new ways to understand the image’s relation to space, sensoriality, and digitality, as well as to develop an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the political ontology of motion, form, matter, and noise.
We invite papers that explore the concept of liquidity across a wide range of moving image media, informed by a wide range of theoretical approaches and engaging with topic including but not limited to:
* liquidity in relation to the historical coiling of race and photographic technologies
* liquidity and “post-cinematic affect”
* the aesthetics of liquidity
* liquidity and the cultural work of form
* liquidity and sound studies
* liquidity, ecocinema, and environmental humanities
* liquidity, new materialism, and posthumanism
* suspension, immersion, transduction, and diffraction as critical strategies in media scholarship and media art practice
* liquidity and feminist, queer, and trans theories
* the “object” of film studies
* liquidity of private and public spheres
* liquidity of labor
* plasticity, plasmaticity, and the evolution of the cinematic and videographic image since 1975
The Rendering (the) Visible III: Liquidity conference encourages interdisciplinarity and experimentation in the study of visuality and moving image media. We are also open to projects that play at the intersection of theory and practice.
Submit paper proposals (300–500 words), including 3-5 bibliographical sources and a brief biography by 20 October 2017.
Please direct queries to movingimagestudies@gmail.com or contact conference organizers Angelo Restivo, Alessandra Raengo, Ethan Tussey, or Jennifer Barker.
Conference opens Thursday evening with a screening of 3-D video work by Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser (OpenEndedGroup). Friday evening features a dance performance by Storyboard P, followed by a discussion with the dancer and Dr. Thomas DeFrantz (Dance; Theatre; and African American Studies, Duke University) in the Five Points MARTA station downtown. Saturday evening, Dr. Grant Farred (Africana Studies Research Center, Cornell University) presents the keynote lecture, followed by a closing reception.
The dance performance Friday is presented in conjunction with the Atlanta Mobile Music project. Performers will dance to the music of Atlanta’s commute, accompanied by a Spotify soundtrack of commuters’ music preferences, collected from actual MARTA riders in the months leading up to the event. This community outreach effort encourages commuters to engage with their fellow citizens through their shared love of music. Mobile devices can insulate us from each other by offering an escape to a private virtual world, but we hope that this playlist and performance will figuratively pop the “audio bubbles” that separate people from their fellow commuters.
Rendering (the) Visible III: Liquidity 2018 Conference is made possible through the Center for Collaborative and International Arts (CENCIA), the School of Film, Media & Theatre, and the Creative Media Industries Institute (CMII).
