[Commlist] CFP: uncanny intermediality. International workshop

we invite you to join us on a two-day workshop launching our new 
research project, Affective Intermediality. Cinema between Media, 
Sensation and Reality (supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of 
Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number 
PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-129). In this project our goal is not to provide or 
refine a widely applicable set of abstract concepts regarding the 
connections between media, quite the contrary, we seek to map areas 
where intermediality appears as most elusive and mutable, where it is 
registered as a sensation altering our perception of a medium and where 
it connects to us in an affective way. Acknowledging the historicality 
and embeddedness of media within an ever-changing material world and the 
fact that on both ends of all media processes of creation and reception 
there is a sensitive, cognizant subject, we set out to investigate the 
performative potential of media juxtapositions or ambivalences. This 
performativity, however, hinges on the experience of in-betweenness, 
something that is very hard to define and that may actually drift into 
the territory of the uncanny. As Nicholas Royle explains in his seminal 
book, in the most general sense, the uncanny “has to do with strangeness 
of framing and borders, the experience of liminality” (2003, 2), as 
such, according to its most prominent theorists (Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund 
Freud, Tzvetan Todorov) it is most often associated with the uncertain, 
the oscillation between ontologies (reality or fiction) and states of 
being (life or death). All of these resonate with our perception of 
intermediality, which also means “sensations oscillating in-between 
media, the perception of the characteristic of one medium in another 
like a strong sense of déjà vu, like an ‘otherness’ or an ‘interworld’ 
that is suddenly revealed to us but resists total unravelling”, and 
therefore “always has the potential to appear to us as something deeply 
uncanny” (Ágnes Pethő: The Photofilmic Diorama, 2020, 185). Moreover, 
the digital age has produced new sensations of ambivalence between 
animate and inanimate, human and non-human, natural and artificial, 
immediate and hypermediated, eliciting visceral uncanny effects in 
contemporary art and in everyday media phenomena alike, often involving 
a sense of intermediality, and unsettling our familiar concepts of 
“self” and “affect” (see Kriss Ravetto’s Digital Uncanny, 2019). 
Starting our project, we propose a friendly debate around some of the 
issues that puzzle us in this regard, and in which bringing together the 
concepts of intermediality and the uncanny may prove productive.

We suggest the following topics to be addressed by participants (and we 
also welcome any relevant new ones that can expand the area of 
investigations):
• cinema “haunted” by the other arts; uncanniness generated through 
contamination between cinema and painting, photography, installation 
art, etc., and vice versa; the uncanny cinematic tableau;
• the strangeness of framings, perspectives and viewpoints introduced by 
techniques of intermediality;
• images making their “unhomely” home in-between the arts; the 
uncanniness of repeated remediations;
• intermediality and the digital uncanny;
• the uncanny oscillation between emotional engagement, immersion and 
alienation effects introduced through intermediality in cinema and 
contemporary art using moving images;
• intermediality in conjunction with interculturality and the uncanny 
experience of otherness;
• presentations of practice as research approaches to the “uncanniness” 
of intermediality;
• a metatheoretical approach: the “homelessness”, i.e. the in-between 
status of intermediality studies, a survey or a personal testimony 
regarding the conditions and the state-of-the-art in researches in the 
field.

On this occasion, we will also proudly launch two books written by 
members of our research team:
Hajnal Király’s The Cinema of Manoel de Oliveira: Modernity, 
Intermediality and the Uncanny, published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Judit Pieldner’s Adaptation, Remediation and Intermediality: Forms of 
In-betweenness in Cinema, published by Editura Presa Universitară 
Clujeană, 2020.

We plan this as a relaxed and stimulating in-person event, but if the 
situation demands, we are prepared to switch to a more uncanny, hybrid 
format (i.e. offline presentations combined with online contributions).
The official language of the conference is English. The time for 
presentations is 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute debate.
Participation fee (which includes coffee and buffet style reception): 70 
EUR / 350 RON.
(Details about payment method to be communicated after the submission 
deadline.)
A selection of papers based on the presentations will be published in 
2023 in a special issue of our international, peer reviewed journal 
(Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film & Media Studies) indexed in several 
prestigious international databases (e.g. Web of Science Core 
Collection: Emerging Sources Citation Index, ERIH Plus).

Please send your proposals by filling in the SUBMISSION FORM available 
on our website: 
http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/uncanny-intermediality, or here: 
https://forms.gle/zDrygRWbzDnnEgr77, until the 15th of September 2022, 
and feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions at: 
(uncanny.intermediality /at/ gmail.com)
We will send you acceptance notices by the 20th of September the latest 
(but feel free to request an earlier reply if you submit earlier than 
the final deadline and need it).


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