International Symposium – CFP: Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture. Istanbul, May 21-22, 2011.
This international symposium will be addressed by keynote speakers Professors Stephen Bann, Victor Burgin and Lisa Parks.
Lewis Johnson
Department of Photography and Video
Bah esehir University
CFP: Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture
International Symposium in Visual Culture
Bahcesehir University, Faculty of Communications, Department of Photography and Video 20, 21 May 2011
Deadline: 31.3.2011
Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture, the first of a series of international symposia on visual culture to be held at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, aims to enable discussion and debate on topics critical in the conceptualization, analysis, evaluation of and intervention in visual culture today.
Once apparently marginal, critical debate in visual culture over mobility, actual, virtual and imaginary, has become crucial to formulating positions both in relation to changes in communications technologies and in social and political relations. Digital visual technologies, it is claimed, have multiplied the sites of viewing, shifting audiences from positions of passive receptivity, associated with discourses of modern visual culture, into a series of modes of interaction. Yet, it is also argued that the encoding of kinaesthetic responsiveness in such forms of interaction represents a more thorough penetration of imaginative activities than ever before
Contributions are thus sought from scholars working in visual studies, in the history and theory of art, photographic, film, video and/or media studies that engage with issues of actual, virtual and imaginary modes of mobility in relation to images, still, moving and interactive, across modern and/or postmodern frameworks. We are particularly interested in ways in which the thinking of mobility in visual culture implicates issues of boundaries, borders and limits and, given the situation of the University overlooking Asian from European Istanbul, we invite contributions that concern that critical form of actual and imaginary mobility, orientalism, along with neo-orientalist variants and modes of resistant counter-orientalist practice. Contributions that address dominant, but also repressed, residual and/or emergent senses of space are also encouraged.
Further priorities may emerge from a range of topics that include the following:
Histories and theorizations of mobile spectatorship, e.g. flaneurism, the derive, lines of flight Mass and other forms of mobilization Figures of immobility in accounts of modern and/or postmodern mass culture, e.g. spectacle and passivity Monocularity, binocularity and complexifications of perspectival space Forms of surveillance and counter-surveillance Temporality and movement in film and video Territoriality, deterritorialization, reterritorialization and the image Intra-corporeal and endoscopic visualities Satellite and network visualities Simulation and mobility New media, mobility and fantasy Digital interactivity, kinaesthesia and the image Mobility and fantasy in gaming Mobile screen visualities, fantasy and sociability Histories and theorizations of mobile authorship Reading mobile corporeality across visual forms Transgression and mobility Theorising fantasy, identification and mobility Distanciation and mobility Posing, performativity and mobility Borders, boundaries, limits and mobility
The symposium will seek to formulate useful positions in thinking the history and futures of visual culture, modes of critical engagement with the increasing variety of visual technologies, in particular mobile ones, and the problematics of actual and imaginary mobility in relation to rhetorics and actualities of globalization.
The symposium will involve 5 or 6 consecutive sessions of three 25 minute papers, and 5 concurrent sessions of five 15 minute papers.
Currently it is envisaged that there will be sessions, of both longer and shorter presentations, on: still images; moving images; interactive images; fantasy and mobility; and borders, boundaries and limits.
Please send proposals of up to 350 words indicating which session your presentation would be best suited and whether the presentation would be for 25 or for 15 minutes (or whether it could be either) to mobilityandfantasy@gmail.com.
Travel and accommodation assistance is available for contributors under 35 years of age, up to a maximum of 350 TL [approx. 160 ?] so please also indicate if you wish to be considered for financial support.
Contact: Lewis Johnson or Tolga Hepdin ler Bahcesehir University Faculty of Communication Department of Photography and Video Ciragan Caddesi, Besiktas
34353 Istanbul
Turkey
0090 (0) 212 381 0446 or 0765
Symposium website: mfvc.bahcesehir.edu.tr