[Commlist] CfP: Music | Video | Spaces Conference

CFP for MUSIC | VIDEO | SPACES
Conference, November 6-7, 2020 at the University of Zurich (Department 
of Social
Anthropology and Cultural Studies)


Conference website: 
https://www.isek.uzh.ch/de/popul%C3%A4rekulturen/veranstaltungen/2020mvs.html


The production and representation of space in film and (pop-)music has 
received increasing scholarly attention as of late. However, a 
surprising blank space appears at the most obvious intersection of these 
two fields of study: the music video. This conference jumps off from the 
observation that since their inception, music videos have been highly 
prolific media of spatial imagination and production.


 From lovestruck skating middle-class teenagers in Californian suburbs 
in Air’s “All I Need” to cartographies of North-American small town 
childhoods in Men I Trust’s sentimental Super 8
driven video for “Tailwhip;” from attempts to escape similar spaces and 
accompanying mentalities in Tocotronic’s “Hey Du” to nostalgically 
rendered images of countercultural nature in Kurt Vile’s “One Trick 
Ponies;” from the folkloristic imaginations of a Morris dancing British 
village in Stealing Sheep’s “Apparation” to the ironic, touristic gaze 
on highly mediatized Icelandic wilderness in Mourn’s “Fun at the 
Geysers;” from the hypervertical urbanism of Forest Swords’ “Crow” to 
the Google Street View-inspired white middle class gaze on an 
African-American neighbourhood in Vince Staple’s “Fun;” from hipsterish 
mid-century architecture connoisseurship in Delmoro’s “Dove Siamo 
Finito” to the explorations of contemporary city-scapes through the 
Mancunian public transport system in Equiknoxx’s “Manchester,” music 
videos conceive, depict and perform a variety of imaginary, 
communicative, social and natural spaces.


Though the spatialities of music video production and aesthetics have 
not been subject to systematic academic scrutiny yet, some solitary case 
studies pave the way. These give a first
impression of the wide scope of spatial entanglements within music 
videos, covering diverse themes including geographical engagements with 
the semiotics of high-rise architecture exploring London’s skyline in 
contemporary British music videos or housing estates in German gangster 
rap videos. Forays into the spatial intersections of political economy 
and cultural history have produced important insights into 
representations of the disruption experienced in post-industrial 
Chemnitz in Eastern Germany but also the depiction of yachts and islands 
in 1980s British pop music. Many case studies have zoned in on the role 
of music video landscapes and their importance for national imaginaries 
in Iceland. Other reflections on nature and landscape have zeroed in on 
questions of genre and space, for instance with regard to country music. 
However, some seminal pioneering work, e.g. Diedrich Diederichsen’s and 
Kodwo Eshun’s TV essay on the representation of outer space in music 
videos (Fantastic Voyages 1999), has almost faded into oblivion.


A systematic engagement with music video spaces bringing together 
scholarship on music videos with research on the nexus between music and 
urbanity, nature and landscape is still
lacking. The conference aims at contributing to address this gap. 
Possible paper topics and questions could include, but are not limited to:


• How can connections between local music scenes and their music video 
production be
described? What relation is there between specific varieties of urban 
habitus, local
textures, the mythspaces of renowned music cities and music video 
production?


• In what ways is the visual staging of space in the pop music video 
connecting with but
also changing the lyrical and musical conjuring of space?


• Genres like hip-hop, grime, country, ambient but also 
singer-songwriters etc. have always
been very sensitive to picking up local atmospheres, soundscapes, 
ambiances. In what
ways have genres developed distinct music video spaces and how have they 
developed
over the decades?


• How are architectural epochs and discourses of landscape and nature 
enacted and
negotiated, especially regarding the imagination and construction of 
nationally and locally
distinct pop music cultures?


• How does the increasingly emphasised conflict between 
urban/metropolitan and rural,
deindustrialized or otherwise marginalized spaces find its expression in 
music videos?
How can music videos be made productive in these times of surging populism,
polarization, sharpening levels of inequalities and their spatialized 
cleavages?


• What is the relationship between pop music as protest music and the 
spatiality of music
videos? How do phenomena like gentrification, racism, classism, urban 
protest
movements or the neoliberal governance of space figure in music videos?


• In which ways are the aligned spatialities and visualities of recently 
emerging scopic
regimes, such as Google Street View or the vertical perspectives of 
Google Earth or the
proliferation of drone footage, enacted and problematised in music 
videos? How are these
enactments related to other highly spatial and mobile aesthetics such as 
those of video
games and contemporary cinema’s computer generated images?


• How are music video spaces related to historical and recent 
representations of urban
space? Do they function as marketing tools within the increasing 
competition among cities
and their accelerating “self-culturalization”? What is their role in 
processes of
touristification and accompanying ways of seeing and producing images?


• How do built spaces and subjective inner spaces or practices and 
imaginaries of
emplacement and embodiment intersect in music video spaces? Is the 
classical figure of
the flaneur still relevant for contemporary explorations of spatial 
experience?


• How do music videos address — and maybe even challenge — the classical 
tropes of the
sublime and concomitant representations of nature, e.g. forests, 
mountains, the sea?


• Which speculative and heterotopic (utopic, dystopic) spaces — outer 
space, say, or
imaginations of the natural condition — are mapped out? How did these 
representations
change, especially with regard to the perception that we move towards a 
state of multiple
crises (Anthropocene, climate change, species extinction)?


Please submit presentation proposals (300-500 words) by 29 March 2020 
via email to
Maximilian Jablonowski at (jablonowski /at/ isek.uzh.ch) and Johannes Springer 
at j.springer@hs-osnabrueck.
de.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us for questions and expressions of 
interest.

The conference conveners seek to raise funding for travel expenses.

Conference conveners: Maximilian Jablonowski (Zurich) & Johannes 
Springer (Osnabrück)

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