International Symposium in Visual Culture
Bahçeşehir 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 Bahçeşehir
University, İstanbul, 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 dérive, 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 /at/ gmail.com).
Travel and accommodation assistance is available
for contributors under 35 years of age, up to a
maximum of 350 TL [approx. 160 Є] so
please also indicate if you wish to be considered for financial support.
Contact: Lewis Johnson or Tolga Hepdinçler
Bahçeşehir University
Faculty of Communication
Department of Photography and Video
Cırağan Caddesi, Beşiktaş
34353 Istanbul
Turkey
+90 212 381 0446 or 0765
(mobilityandfantasy /at/ gmail.com)
Symposium website: (mfvc /at/ bahcesehir.edu.tr)
contact email: (mobilityandfantasy /at/ gmail.com)
