Archive for 2012

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[ecrea] Fast/Slow Symposium: Reminder and Keynotes Announced

Sat Nov 17 09:31:55 GMT 2012



With apologies for cross posting, we are writing to remind you that the deadline for submissions for the Fast/Slow symposium is 30 November, 2012.

We are also pleased to announce our two keynote speakers:

Professor Sean Cubitt
Prof. Sean Cubitt is currently researching the history of visual technologies, media art history, and relationships between environmental and post-colonial criticism of film and media, three strands that converge around the political economy of globalization and aesthetics. His publications include EcoMedia (Rodopi, 2005?), The Cinema Effect (MIT Press, 2004), ?Simulation and Social Theory (Sage, 2001), Digital Aesthetics (Sage, 1998), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (Macmillan,1993), ?and Timeshift: On Video Culture (Routledge, 1991).

Professor Karen Beckman
Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media in the department of the History of Art. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke UP, 2003); Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Duke UP, 2010), and is now working on a new book, Animation and the Contemporary Art of War. She is co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and On Writing With Photography (forthcoming, Minnesota UP) with Liliane Weissberg, and is currently editing a book entitled Animating Film Theory, which explores the marginalization of animation in film theoretical discussions. She has published articles on a range of subjects, including feminism and terrorism, death penalty photography, the animated documentary, and the relationship between cinema and contemporary art. She is a senior editor of the journal Grey Room.




Call for Papers:
Fast/Slow: Intensifications of Cinematic Speed


In recent years, questions of speed have become the focus of keen and often polarised debate across a range of aesthetic, political, and critical contexts. It has become something of a truism to say that we live in a ‘go-faster’ world defined by the ever-increasing rapidity of the rhythms and cycles of media, technology, and capital. In response, a set of ‘slow’ cultural practices have emerged—the Slow Food Movement, the Slow Media Manifesto, The Idler Academy, or the recent ‘A/V Festival: As Slow as Possible’—which figure slowness as perhaps the emblematic mode of resistance for our time.

In the context of contemporary cinema aesthetics, this interest in speed has likewise been paralleled by a particular intensification of pace, temporality, and duration in both directions, from the hyper-kinetic, frenzied rhythms of ‘intensified continuity’ (Bordwell) or ‘accelerationist aesthetics’ (Shaviro), to the protracted, snail-like pace of ‘slow’ or ‘contemplative cinema’ (Romney; Flanagan). While these dual tendencies have received a good deal of critical attention to date, discussions have at times had a tendency to polarise opinion and to reinforce presumed dichotomies between passive consumption and active viewing, Hollywood cinema and globalauteur filmmaking, distraction and attention, commercialisation and art.

The Fast/Slow Symposium calls for a critical re-evaluation of speed and intensification in the cinema. The aim of the symposium is to move beyond reductive binaries, and to encourage a range of fine-grained critical analyses that shed new light on the role of speed in cinema. How might we think fast/slow instead as a more complex form of relationality? How have fast/slow relations been forged and reconfigured by evolving technologies, and by socio-economic and political realities? How have changing sites and modes of spectatorship inflected the way speed is registered phenomenologically? How do new cinematic practices and techniques—from ‘bullet time’ and ‘cosmic zooms’ to ‘timestretching’—create multiple, in-between temporalities, paces, and rhythms, which challenge the fast/slow divide? What are the affective and critical valences of both fast and slow cinematic practices? Is there an ethics of cinematic speed? How might we historicize these divisions, and evaluate the ideological and technological underpinnings of speed across cinema’s history?

Questions for consideration may include, but are not confined to, the following:
·       The phenomenology of speed
·       Speed and the ‘attention economy’
·       Speed and/as textuality
·       ‘Accelerationist’ vs. ‘Slow Cinema’ aesthetics
·       Speed aesthetics and politics
·       Affect and the ethics of cinematic speed
·       Fast/Slow affect/effects: boredom, stimulation, tension, sensation

Please send abstracts of 350 words or less, by e-mail attachment, to (bothTina.Kendall /at/ anglia.ac.uk) and (Neil.Archer /at/ anglia.ac.uk) by 30 November 2012

The symposium will take place 4-5 April 2013 at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge

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