[Commlist] Call for Proposals – International Conference || Histories of Tacit Cinematic Knowledge

Call for Proposals – International Conference

Histories of Tacit Cinematic Knowledge

June 25-27, 2020
Goethe University Frankfurt (Campus Westend)
Organized by the Graduate Research Training Program 2279 “Configurations 
of Film”
www.konfigurationen-des-films.de <http://www.konfigurationen-des-films.de>

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
- Teresa Castro (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3)
- Jie Li (Harvard University)
- Henning Schmidgen (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

During a hospital stay in the US, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss 
became fascinated
with the nurses’ gait, which reminded him of the peculiar way of walking 
by Hollywood movie stars. Back on his feet and back in Paris, Mauss 
noticed the same gait among Parisian women: “In fact, American walking 
fashions had begun to arrive [in France], thanks to the movies.” However 
problematically gendered it now appears, Mauss’s observation, which he 
made in connection with his study Techniques of the Body (1934), alerts 
us to an important mode of knowledge circulation that we define as 
“tacit cinematic knowledge”: implicit, informal, and uncodified 
knowledge acquired in, with, and through film and cinema that informs 
cultural and social practice outside the cinematic dispositif. Drawing 
on Michael Polanyi’s concept of “tacit knowledge,” the notion of “tacit 
cinematic knowledge” allows us to theorize how tacit epistemic templates 
that use cinematic forms and techniques configure and enable daily 
activities, social interactions, warfare, education, and working procedures.

The theorization of “tacit cinematic knowledge” also has a historical 
dimension. Cinematic techniques have been common in many fields of 
cultural practice since the development of moving image technologies, 
and configurations of film have continuously appeared in unexpected 
locations and unsuspected forms, formats, usages, and temporalities 
beyond the cinema. In the late 1930s, Eisenstein described architecture 
in terms of a “montage sequence ... subtly composed, shot by shot” by 
his legs as he walked among the buildings of the Acropolis. In the early 
1940s, war reporter and novelist Vasily Grossman wrote about the 
experience of battle, stating that he was “forever feeling as if I am on 
the cinema screen, not just watching it.” Today, airports, data centers, 
weather stations, laboratories of aerodynamics and fluid mechanics, 
corporations, military bases, schools are just a few examples of sites 
where cinematic knowledge routinely supports and shapes different sorts 
of procedures, social and object interactions. From software for the 
visual design of industrial products to games for military training, 
from surveillance cameras to telepresence robots that facilitate 
multinational corporate meetings, from videos that guide the bodily 
movements of people learning a new recipe on the Internet to 
self-tracking devices that allow for performance control, film 
technologies have become ubiquitous. In other words, in order to 
understand the present state of tacit cinematic knowledge, we also need 
to understand how film entered into a variety of realms of practices, 
which are at first sight unrelated to film in its cinematic context.

The international conference “Histories of Tacit Cinematic Knowledge” 
invites scholars to further theorize and historicize “tacit cinematic 
knowledge” in its different configurations. Specific questions to be 
addressed include: What is the unnoticed part of cinematic knowledge in 
the production of scientific evidence? How do techniques and templates 
from film affect architectural design, musical composition, or sports 
performance? How do modes of circulation and formats of film reshape 
human and non-human interactions and what types of political action do 
they inconspicuously give rise to? How does “tacit cinematic knowledge” 
create inequalities through processes of colonizing, and of gendering 
societies, or what is the potential of “tacit cinematic knowledge” in 
opposing institutional discrimination? What impact do configurations of 
film beyond the cinema have on economies of production, distribution, 
and consumption? How do film-based technologies inform policies of 
security and regulate the circulation of people? How do filmic 
procedures generate affect and emotions in areas that apparently have 
nothing to do with film?

We welcome contributions from all scientific fields, including 
sociology, anthropology, architecture, literature, musicology, 
educational sciences, neurosciences, engineering and technology studies, 
theatre, film and media studies. We are especially interested in papers 
that engage with the following topics:

Tacit Cinematic Knowledge and:
- Visual Literacy, Data Visualization, Didactics
- Architecture, Networks, Infrastructures
- Body, Embodiment, Performativity
- Sounds, Soundtracks, Film Scoring Practices
- Sensors, Screens, Secrecy, and Surveillance
- Industrial Complex, Corporate Culture, Institutional Practices
- Race, Gender, Labor, Sexuality
- Amateur Media, Participatory Culture, Media Convergence
- Globalization, Transnationalism, Nationalism

Please send 250–300 word abstracts and a brief biographical note to 
(2020tacit /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(2020tacit /at/ gmail.com)> by January 15, 2020. 
Applicants will be notified of acceptance by February 15, 2020.

The conference organizers have set aside funds for travel grants for 
graduate students and precariously employed (part time on limited 
contract) or currently unemployed scholars. Further information about 
the application process for travel grants will be sent out with the 
acceptance notifications. Information about the event will be available 
at www.konfigurationen-des-films.de/en 
<http://www.konfigurationen-des-films.de/en>.

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