[Commlist] CFP: Besides the Screen 2019 - Graphic Intelligences & Algorithmic Fictions

*Besides the Screen 2019: Graphic Intelligences & Algorithmic Fictions
*A conference about all things GPU
Vitória and São Paulo, Brazil, 03-08 June 2019


Call for papers, artworks and other contributions
Submission deadline: *02 March 2019*

The passage from cinema to post-cinema is often heralded as a cleavage 
in image practices. Photography loses its ground to rendering, editing 
to compositing, and projection to streaming. New storytelling 
assemblages and their respective affects signalize the dissolution of 
the medium’s operational principles and their reconstitution in new 
technical underpinnings. This cinema of graphic processing, associated 
to interface design and videogames, allows for an unexpected epistemic 
stability. Ever since the – effective, if not symbolic – abandonment of 
celluloid film, never did we have a material component as expressive of 
the logic of cinematographic representation as in the figure of the 
/graphics cards/. Neither, paradoxically, so atypical.

/Graphic Processing Units /have become the unlikely bedrock of a wide 
range of prominent industries to emerge in the last decades. Their high 
parallel processing power has invited uses beyond the most obvious 
applications in fields such as computer vision and virtual reality. 
These computer architectures, historically developed to simulate 
appearances, are currently employed in the production of statistical 
truths. Untethered from screens, GPUs have been used in enterprises as 
diverse as machine learning and cryptocurrency mining. In this context, 
to the same extent they embody a new cinematographic /rationale/, 
graphic cards stand as an important territory of dispute and convergence 
between media industries and other contemporary sociotechnical systems.

The ninth edition of the Besides the Screen conference takes the 
economic and cultural centrality of video cards as the point of 
departure to explore the reconfiguration of audiovisual systems and the 
emergence of new media practices and politics. We invite abstracts for 
papers, workshops, single/multi-channel artworks, audiovisual 
performances, installations pieces, and/or panels that explore all 
things GPU, covering topics such as:


- Procedural cinema, virtual/augmented/mixed reality, and videogames;
- Logic and applications of computer vision and cognition;
- Special effects, shaders, and new affective assemblages;
- Executable, performative, operational, and real-time images;
- Desktop documentaries, let’s play videos, and other performative 
appropriations of GUI;
- Probabilistic spaces, frame prediction, and the temporalities of 
rendering;
- Deep dreaming, deepfakes, and other generative forms based on neural 
networks;
- Political bias of artificial intelligence and machine learning;
- Cryptocurrency mining and / as infrastructural detours of GPUs.

Submissions of individual papers, panels and lectures should include an 
abstract of about 250 words and a short biographical note (150 words). 
Artwork, demo and installation proposals should include a short 
description/ synopsis (250 words), links to available documentation 
(videos / pictures / drafts), a complete list of technical requirements, 
and short biographical note (150 words).

Proposals must be submitted by *02 March 2019* to the address 
/(besidesthescreen /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(besidesthescreen /at/ gmail.com)>/ with 
the subject heading *2019 CONFERENCE PROPOSAL.*

We strongly encourage submissions from early career researchers and 
research-practitioners.

Participants will not be charged a registration fee.

* * *
Besides the Screen is an international research network on the subject 
of experimental audiovisual media. It aims to reconfigure the field of 
screen studies by refocusing it on the seemingly secondary objects, 
processes, and practices that exist within cinema. Besides the Screen 
also means to promote an open and horizontal academic environment, 
favouring practice-based approaches to research and artist 
collaborations. Info from previous conferences can be found at 
besidesthescreen.com <http://besidesthescreen.com>.


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