[Commlist] CFP: Media Fields Conference UCSB: Display

The UCSB Media Fields Editorial Collective is excited to announce the 
call for papers for:

Display | Excess and Visibility in Film, Media, and Culture

*M*edia Fields VII Conference | April 3-5, 2019

*University of California | *Santa Barbara


Keynote Speakers:Soraya Murray(Associate Professor in Film and Digital 
Media at University of California Santa Cruz and principal faculty in 
Art and Design Games and Playable Media), Joshua Neves(Assistant 
Professor Film Cinema Studies at Concordia, Canada Research Chair, and 
Director of the Global Emergent Media Lab).

Special Event: Screening of Shakedown (2018) and post-screening 
discussion with Director Leilah Weinrauband Professor of Feminist 
Studies Mireille Miller-Young.

******

DNA ancestry reports. Neon billboards. Bodycam videos. Reality tv 
competitions. GIS maps. Stock tickers. Real-time election coverage. 
Televised court cases. Local drag shows. Protest live streams. 3D 
ultrasounds. Reddit AMAs. Twitch feeds.

Our contemporary mediascape is ostensibly awash with outlets to 
visualize and represent modern life. The discourse of an “always on” and 
seamlessly connected global visual culture is built upon an excess of 
visibility and accessibility, which hides as much as it reveals. From 
this vantage, early theories of the modern spectacle are at once 
uncannily relevant and seemingly outdated. From this vantage, the Media 
Fields Editorial Collective at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Film & 
Media Studies is seeking proposals for its upcoming biennial conference 
that address this year’s theme — Display— through the lenses of excess 
and visibility.

Early theorists in film and media studies exploring visibility, 
sensation, and excess centered the spectacle as an organizing object of 
study. As the everyday is continually mediated through communication 
technologies and entertainment experiences and intensified by 
postmodernity, digitization, and globalization, we seek to consider how 
theories of the excessive spectacular can be revised by considering the 
(in)visible display. Seeking to explore the usefulness of display to 
interrogate contemporary media cultures and revisit historical 
questions, we ask: What continuities, disjunctions, and transformations 
exist between historical and contemporary cultures of display? Does a 
mediascape saturated with visibility and excess call for a reexamination 
of the spectacle? Does the excess of the spectacle still resonate with 
contemporary media practices? And, what does moving from 
spectacletodisplayopen up in our thinking on these topics?How can we 
better investigate what is on the surface, behind, underneath, and 
beyond the display?

In interrogating this topic, we seek papers that explore media’s 
relationship with display in its various forms: as media objects, 
industry practices, social processes, and cultural artifacts. We invite 
a range of works that explore the modes and means of visibility; 
strategies and practices of image construction; relationships between 
the production and promotion of display; encounters and engagements with 
display regimes; intersections of aesthetics and the politics of 
display; forms of local, national, regional, and global aspirations and 
belonging; and interactions between multisensory spectacle and forms of 
subjectivity, resistance, and imagination.

Papers may reflect on display as it relates to questions around the 
following themes. We especially encourage submissions that work to 
decenter dominant paradigmatic privileges.

  *

    Space: architecture and design; media mobility; built environments
    and urban spaces; extractive and environmental media; public,
    consumer, and leisure spaces; domestic and private spaces; questions
    of scale (global, regional, local, national, territorial); physical
    infrastructures and urban planning

  *

    Industry: trade shows and conventions; distribution and exhibition;
    audience construction and measurement; ownership structures and
    affiliations; labor dynamics; cultures of production; digital
    infrastructures (data collection, storage, and analytics;
    algorithms; moderation practices; walled gardens; geoblocking)

  *

    Representation: film, tv, game and transmedial representations;
    publics and counterpublics; protest, disruption, and direct action;
    surveillance and policing; digital identities; data visualizations;
    immersive technologies; simulation and virtual reality

  *

    Embodiment: performance; trauma and memory; haptic, aural, and other
    sensory experiences; disciplinary regimes; articulations and
    experiences of difference (race, class, gender, ability, sexuality,
    age); belonging and community

  *

    Objects: media devices; screens and surfaces; imaging technologies
    (geographic information displays [GIDs], medical, environmental,
    military); signage, billboards, and promotional materials; markers,
    sensors, and indicators; attractions and amusements

  *

    Use: digital interfaces; platforms; mapping and navigation;
    connected viewing; online gaming; social media; digital consumer and
    retail practices; remix, copyleft, and piracy cultures; digital and
    streaming communities (YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, 4chan)

Panelists will have 15-20 minutes to present their papers. Please email 
a 250- to 300-word proposal and a brief bio (in PDF format) to 
(display.mediafields /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(display.mediafields /at/ gmail.com)> by 
January 15, 2019. For any inquiries, please contact the conference 
organizers: Aleah Kiley ((aleahkiley /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(aleahkiley /at/ gmail.com)>), Charlotte Orzel ((charlotteorzel /at/ ucsb.edu) 
<mailto:(charlotteorzel /at/ ucsb.edu)>), Nicole Strobel ((nstrobel /at/ ucsb.edu) 
<mailto:(nstrobel /at/ ucsb.edu)>), and Xiuhe Zhang ((xiuhezhang /at/ ucsb.edu) 
<mailto:(xiuhezhang /at/ ucsb.edu)>).


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