[ecrea] Gorizia's MAGIS International Spring School

/_FilmForum 2018_/

//

/XVI MAGIS International Film Studies Spring School/

_Gorizia (Italy), March 3^rd -7^th 2018_//

//

*/At the Edges of Nobody’s Empire: Media, Politics, and Representations/*

In the past years, the interrelationships between media, politics, and 
representations played a crucial role in the /media studies/ debate. 
Drawing on this debate, we aim to reflect upon the ways in which media 
constantly reshape communities, identities, cultural and aesthetical 
representations, becoming “ideological agents” rather than neutral 
tools. Thus, the next edition of the Spring School will be devoted to 
the relationships between media, politics, and representations – more 
specifically, we aim to thoroughly investigate their implications and, 
at the same time, to extend them, trying to pinpoint their 
*cultural/aesthetical*, *socio-political, and historical* layers.

From the *cultural* and *aesthetical* point of view, we aim to 
understand how the interrelationships between media, politics, and 
representations evoke their own “cultural techniques” in “articulating 
the real” (Siegert 2015). In fact, media, politics and representations 
engage in dialogue with the notion of “realism”, “mimesis”, 
“authenticity” and “living beings and forms” as techniques that “model” 
our sense of present and our sense of past, creating, at the same time, 
identities (related to sex, gender, or race), communities, and the 
historical evidences that shape their histories. More broadly, we will 
investigate the interrelationships between cultural identities and media 
production (Hall 1997); how cinema and audiovisual media have been used 
in the past to shape our “perception” and our sense of “identity”; how 
cinema and audiovisual media have been (and still are) used to /perform/ 
these identities, often building cultural remedies against their 
(metaphorical) “calcification” and “illness” – especially when these 
identities relate to cultural and individual carriers of memories 
(Rousso 1991).

From the *socio-political* point of view, we will question how the 
media have become able to create a “sense of belonging to a community” 
and, at the same time, to shape specific /power/knowledge/ relations. 
The call-for-paper would then revolve around how the media take (and 
took) part in the microphysics of power (Foucault 1973-74) and 
biopolitics (Foucault 1977-1978). Moreover, drawing on an 
“intersectional” perspective (Creenshaw 2017), we will explore the 
complexity of the interrelationships between sex, gender and race 
through the “looking glass” of media production. More specifically, we 
will reflect upon the different ways in which the media take (and took) 
part in the dialectic between centre and margin (hooks 2015 [1989]) as 
regards sex, gender and race representations. Lastly, on the opposite 
side, we will welcome analyses on the role of the media in the 
colonization and exteriorization of knowledge realized by “cognitive 
capitalism” (Stiegler 2010), especially artistic and cultural productions.

 From the *historical*point of view, drawing on Carlo Ginzburg’s 
reflections on the notions of /true, false, and fictive/(2006) and on 
his criticism of Hayden White’s metahistory, we will try to understand 
how the interrelationships between media production, socio-political 
representations, the notion of community and the notion of margin allow 
us to reflect on history as a discipline that is inherently linked to 
the concepts of uncertainty, of fragment, of ruins and of discontinuity, 
rather than to the sense of coherence that stems from a well-structured 
“historical novel”. In other words, we seek the ways to understand how 
the media affect the epistemological and methodological tensions between 
/present and past/, between /contemporaneity and history/, between 
/evidences/and /reconstructions of the past/, between /objectivity/and 
/subjectivity/, between /powerful /and /dominated subjects/, which 
engage in dialogue with the ideological conditions of “writing history”.

That being stated, our call for paper will be, as usual, organised in 
five different sections. Every proposal *_must be_* addressed to a 
specific section of the Spring School: Cinema and Contemporary Arts, The 
Film and Media Heritage, Media Archaeology, Porn Studies, and Post-Cinema.

*Cinema and Contemporary Arts – The Arts of Documentary*

Starting from the growing concerns about what is “truth” and what comes 
after it, the Cinema and Contemporary Arts Section takes its cue from 
the reflection recently launched by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg in their 
edited volume /Documentary Across Disciplines/ (2016), in order to 
investigate the very complex definition of the documentary image in 
documentary practice.

In 2001 the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl has defined the documentary 
mode as something always doubtful: according to the German artist, the 
uncertainty of the documentary is a lack that shall not be hidden since 
it constitutes its core quality. Is it possible to define what a 
documentary really is? Don’t we constantly challenge the way we document 
something just with the mere act of describing it?

Addressing the main topic of the XVI MAGIS International Film Studies 
Spring School, the Cinema and Contemporary Arts section invite scholars 
and students to explore how the interrelationships between media, 
politics, and images articulate the reality in a time of global tension, 
within a framework where contemporary documentary practices are already 
characterized by a substantially flowing nature. Moreover, we encourage 
reflections on the problematic streaming of contemporary documentary 
practice across different media and disciplines, in order to put in 
evidence the shift between spaces and time in contemporary documentary 
experiences.

With these premises, we encourage papers that deal with (but are not 
restricted to) the following topics:

–The use of historical “documents” and/or audiovisual “documentary” 
items in an exhibition context;

–The relationship between documentary and contemporary arts;

–The use of “documentary images” in a contemporary art context;

–The new politics of documentary;

–Spatial montage in relation with documentary practices;

–The relation between true and false in documentary filmmaking

*The Film and Media Heritage – Revolutions. Politics and Media*

Political changes and radical social upheavals seem to be a welcome 
topic//in traditional popular media like literature and film. Through 
and with//ongoing alterations different forms of change – historical, 
current and desired ones – can be handled. One example is the era 
between the French//Revolution of 1789 and the widespread democratic 
upheavals across Europe in 1848, that has motivated and inspired both 
contemporary artists and literary figures between the late 18th century 
and the present as well as filmmakers of the 20th century, trying to 
cope with their own realities under diverse regimes. Examples like these 
lead us to the basic question, how the correlation between politics and 
popular media could be theorized and exemplified. How can we consider 
and explain the – often intuitively//assumed – impact, social and 
political developments have on contemporary narrations? What is 
affecting the complex interdependency between politics and media? And 
how does this complex, on the other hand, affect our ways of writing and 
archiving media history.

*Media Archaeology – Technologies of Power / Power of Technology*

Drawing on the theoretical frame elaborated during the last FilmForum 
(more specifically, as regards the notion of technological network), in 
the XVI Edition of our Spring School the Media Archaeology section will 
focus on the two-fold concept of “technologies of power / power of 
technology”. In other words, we aim to investigate how technological 
devices have taken shape in past and contemporary media landscapes in 
forms of “power” – a system for gathering consensus, for repression, for 
developing a “sense of community”, for elaborating political and social 
identities, for negotiating new syntheses between /bios/ and /zoé 
/(Esposito 2004; see also Parikka 2010; Väliaho 2010), for taking part 
in a /bioderegulated /society (Hennessy 2007, Crary 2013), and so on.

Questioning the concept of /dispositif/ (see Albera, Tortajada 2015) and 
the application of the notion of /agencement /by Deleuze and Guattari 
(Deleuze, Guattari 1980) to the field of film and media studies (Casetti 
2016), we will target the ways in which the technical basis of the 
dispositif engage in dialogue with “key notions or types-notions [...], 
which at a given historical moment come to define a given dispositive”, 
and with the social and political stances of a specific 
timespan/geographical context. More specifically, we will focus on how 
the /dispositif///agencement /shapes “political subjectivities” and, 
vice-versa, how these subjectivities “perform” the /dispositif/, thereby 
transforming it.

Moreover, we would like to stress the importance of the notion of 
“power” in respect to technological hardware and software: power as 
“life” of a technology; power as the “energy” set free by technological 
apparatuses, etc.

More specifically, we will welcome proposals on the following topics:

–media technology and microphysics/biopolitics;

–media /dispositif/agencement /and agency: media /dispositifs /and 
“media gestures”, media and cultural agencies in the second half of the 
XX^th century and in the XXI^st century, media hacking, media and 
protests/strikes, etc;

–media technologies of gender: media technology and Feminist Theory, 
discourses on media practices and gender;

–media technology and Critical Race Theory;

–media technologies and networks in post-industrial societies;

–technologies, hardware and bodies: technology and embodiment, cyborgs, 
simians, cyberpunk culture, zombie media, etc.;

–media technology and the everyday life: amateur practices and power 
relations in the XX^th century and XXI^st century, discourses on media 
in everyday life; media hardware bricolage, hardware 
assembling/dismantling, hardware as a black box, etc.

–power and energy: “how integrated are the circuits between physical 
modes of energy and physiological sources, between physiology and the 
psyche” (Elsaesser 2016); power and the impact of connectivity, 
technological acceleration and the redefinition of temporality in the 
technological turbo-capitalistic societies (Crary 2013) etc.

*Porn Studies – Pornography: Margins and Extremes*

In the 2018 edition of the Gorizia Spring School, the main objective of 
the Porn Studies section is to explore the margins and extremes of 
pornography in contemporary mediasphere, as well as in its historical 
developments.

The notions of margin and marginality may refer to “the place of 
repressed or subordinated textual meanings” (Brooker 2003: 152), but 
also to the specific position of non-mainstream intellectuals, subjects 
and social groups. In this sense, margin(ality) can either be a place of 
alienation, social exclusion, and normative oppression or a “space of 
radical openness” and a “position and place of resistance” (hooks 2015 
[1989]: 228, 231; see also: Walker 1999), from which it is possible to 
re-articulate dominant discourses and produce new meanings and 
interpretative perspectives. At the same time, extremities and extremes 
can be understood in Foucauldian terms as places in which power becomes 
“capillary” (Foucault 1980: 39) and productive – that is where power is 
materialized in actual practices and produces real effects (Colucci 
2004: 128) on bodies and subjectivities.

In our view, pornography can be understood as both a margin and an 
extreme of mainstream culture. In this perspective, it represents one of 
the places in which normative discourses and power dynamics are at their 
most visible and effective; on the other hand, however, pornography can 
sometimes be seen as the space of production of counter-discourses that 
might disrupt dominant perceptions and beliefs about gender, sexuality 
and the body.

With this in mind, we aim to analyse the repressed or subordinated 
textual and social meanings that characterize (or, conversely, that are 
produced by) pornography in its different historical and geographical 
forms, as well as to investigate the micro-politics of power at play in 
pornographic media and representations and their possible subversive 
re-articulations.

We invite proposals that explore, but are not restricted to, the 
following areas:

–Extreme pornography, extreme bodies, extreme representations

–Body modifications, aesthetic surgery and the re-conceptualization of 
aesthetic standards

–Marginal groups, identities, subjectivities in pornography

–Lives “at the margins”: performers, directors and producers’ biographies

–Marginal celebrities: the meaning of pornographic stardom in the wider 
context of celebrity culture

– Niche pornographic genres and consumption practices

– Marginal technologies of pornography: dismissed devices, obsolete 
media, outdated representations

– Marginal economies of pornography: small and independent studios, 
local businesses, memories of pornographic consumption

– At the margins of the city: movie theatres, arcades, sex shops as 
places of consumption and socialization

– Marginal pornographic industries and non-US productions

– Legal controversies, censorship, regulation

– Political debates on pornography: stigma and social scapegoating or 
liberation and empowerment

– Media discourses on pornography

– Mainstream representations of pornography (in film, television, press)

*Post-cinema – **VR and AR a Postcinematic Modernity II***

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), as well as establishing 
new identities and expanding the perceptions of existing users and the 
technologies they use, also represent two cardinal points in the 
(re)definition of participative and political practices in current media 
landscape. In this sense the Postcinema section would like to explore 
the "community/knowledge/power" relationship and the 
"community/history/truth" relationship in the production and diffusion 
of certain "media products", in particular the VR and AR ones. The 2018 
Post Cinema section of the Magis Spring School  takes into 
considerations proposals in the following fields:

–Literacy and socio-economic accessibility linked to VR and AR in the 
new media (eg, the difficult access to the interfaces of VR gaming or 
the rapport with the casual gaming)

–The creation of social communities linked to the collective use of 
products specially created for their use through VR and AR devices.

– The user's bodily, spatial and temporal perception during the 
pragmatic use of VR and AR. For example, the user's camouflage with 
technology and constant development of dedicated peripherals (war games 
guns, footrests to allow the use of the feet currently not supported, 
introduction of wireless devices for the viewer ...) impact;

–The relationship between truth and post-cinematics products (such as 
documentaries or interactive films, video games, and other digital 
products). In these products whose story is being told? Who is telling 
it? For whom? Whose truth? Who circulates in the market of whom?

–The current use and the future potential of VR and AR as tools for 
interpreting and re-reading a social-political setting.

–The use of "politics" in digital video games and interactive products 
(in the form of satire, parody, narration: eg "Trump Simulator", "Job 
Simulator"). The analysis of the VR development policies adopted by 
different communities or countries, and the investigation of the system 
of power that they configure or contest.

**

*We invite you to send us proposals for papers or panels. The deadline 
for their submission is **October, 25^th **2017.*

**

*Proposals should not exceed one page in length. Please make sure to 
attach a short CV (10 lines**max). A registration fee (€ 150) will be 
applied. For more information, please contact us at 
**/(goriziafilmforum /at/ gmail.com)/* <mailto:(goriziafilmforum /at/ gmail.com)>*/./***

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