[Commlist] CFP Re-scale

CALL FOR PAPERS & AUDIOVISUAL ESSAYS, “RE-SCALE” (PUBLICATION 2023)

Two forthcoming volumes of the journal Interfaces, available on 
OpenEdition, will bring together written articles and video essays that 
explore the ways in which the production, circulation and reception of 
images today involves “rescaling” the visible, and, by extension, our 
experience of the visible, in increasingly radical ways. The two volumes 
will seek to explore the epistemic, philosophical, social, political, 
technological, and aesthetic implications of this phenomenon, both in 
contemporary visual culture and in its histories.

Recent advances in the fields of optics and visual technologies have 
radically opened up our access to the visible, as well as our visual 
sensorium: computer-generated imagery, VR, electronic microscopy, as 
well as electronic detectors imagery have all complexified visuality, by 
producing images which had hitherto been literally unimaginable. At the 
same time as the world was reshaping according to the dual logic of the 
local and the global, optics made it possible for us to see that which 
is normally inaccessible to the human eye: the very close and the very 
far, the infinitely small and immensely large. Although this phenomenon 
of “Gulliverisation” (Huhtamo 2009, 20) was already in evidence from the 
antiquity to the medieval era — in the disparity of scale between large 
murals and miniature paintings for instance — it is essentially 
concurrent with the development of an optic- and screen-based visual 
culture, which made it a defining characteristic of urban environments. 
 From a European perspective, this epistemic change feeds on a 
long-lasting tradition of thought and shared imaginary that arguably 
anticipated some of the changes brought about by the industrial 
revolution (Winston 1996). In turn, the ubiquity of visual technologies 
generated by the advent of electronic, then digital media has 
intensified the effects of the phenomenon both in terms of imaging and 
of screening modes. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic made the domestic 
screens the central element of our access to the visible world, cutting 
it down to size as it were. Confinement and the dependency on personal 
viewing devices showed the potential as well as limits of a scalar logic 
relying on diminished scale and individual viewing, raising anew the 
question of the role of collective spectatorship, and of large-scale 
images, in fostering a different spatial, corporeal and visual 
experience as well as a specific imagining awareness (Hanich 2018; 
Kenderdine 2020).This evolution also involves a rescaling of time that 
started with modernity but intensified with the introduction of 
contemporary, digital, modes of production, distribution and reception 
of images — an issue that connects with recent debates on the economy of 
attention.

Rescaling thus involves formal and technical aspects of image 
production, but also the spatialization, massification, and temporal 
dimension of reception. From the massive advertising boards hung in city 
centers to the tiny mobile phones that most of us now carry through the 
same urban centers, from “binge watching” to flicking through Gifs, the 
ubiquity of scale-shifting technology works to normalize a practice of 
the “miniature and the gigantic” (Stewart 1992), and that practice in 
turn conditions much of our everyday perception of the world.

Today, shifts in scale routinely inform our access to the visible, the 
strangeness of their visual manifestation (as when we exchange through 
visio-conference with the frieze of match- box size talking heads that 
lines up our screen) absorbed by the increased speed of habituation. At 
the same time, visual rescaling still has the power to astonish us. From 
images gathered by space probes, to records of infra-cellular 
observations, advances in the fields of optics and digital technologies 
continue to expand the limits of the visible world. Together with the

proliferation of fixed and mobile screens of all sizes that 
systematically rescale images, such visual reformations work to further 
dis-anchor representation from natural perception.

This CFP concerns scholars in all fields of visual culture interested in 
art and popular culture as well as scientific imagery, including 
painting and graphic arts, photography, architecture, film and video, 
video games and immersive environments. It aims to historicize, as well 
as identify the impact and effect of scale on visual techniques and 
aesthetics, as well as on the re-mediation, circulation and reception of 
images.

We welcome articles and video essays that

- explore the ways in which rescaling alters the form of images (from 
framing to definition, to composition, depth, color, and the 
relationship of sound to image) and the conditions of their apparition, 
spatial and temporal.

- explore the phenomenon of rescaling in contemporary visual culture 
and/or integrate a historical dimension, both in terms of 
media-archaeology and in terms of “structures of feeling”, seeking to 
identify the ways in which scale has shaped our imaginary over a long 
period of time.

- create a dialogue between art and technology, or between art and 
sciences, considering art images and theorizations in relation to 
scientific visualizations including ‘operative’ images (made by and for 
machines).

- address the epistemics and politics of scale in visual culture, 
looking at the ways in which visual scale-shifting shapes our ways of 
viewing and knowing the world, how it underpins identification and 
self-representation, as well as how we configure the place we occupy in 
the world, in local and global, individual and collective, real and 
imaginary terms.

We welcome contributions in French and in English. All articles and 
video essays will be submitted to peer review by two anonymous 
reviewers. Publication will take place in 2023.

Abstracts for both written and audiovisual essays (300 words with a 
brief bibliography and bio) should be sent in by January 10, 2022.

Contributions (for written essays: between 30 000 and 45 000 characters, 
spaces and footnotes included; for audiovisual essays: 20 minutes max.) 
will be expected by June 30, 2022.

Editorial board: Martine Beugnet, Clémence Follea, Ariane Hudelet, 
Eliane de Larminat, Catherine Wheatley

Please send your questions and proposals to:

(beugnetmartine /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(beugnetmartine /at/ gmail.com)> 
(clemence.follea /at/ u-paris.fr) <mailto:(clemence.follea /at/ u-paris.fr)> 
(ariane.hudelet /at/ u-paris.fr) <mailto:(ariane.hudelet /at/ u-paris.fr)> eliane.de 
<http://eliane.de>- (larminat /at/ u-paris.fr) <mailto:(larminat /at/ u-paris.fr)> 
(catherine.wheatley /at/ kcl.ac.uk) <mailto:(catherine.wheatley /at/ kcl.ac.uk)>

Select Bibliography
AUMONT, Jacques. L’Œil interminable. Paris: La différence, 2007.
AZOULAY, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone 
Books, 2008.

BACHELARD, Gaston. La Poétique de l’espace [1958]. Paris: PUF, 2011. 
Trans. Maria Jolas. Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

BEUGNET, Martine. Le Cinéma et ses doubles. L’image de film à l’ère du 
foundfootage numérique et des écrans de poche. Bordeaux: Bord de l’Eau, 
2021.

BEUGNET, Martine, and Annie van den Oever. “Gulliver Goes to the Movies: 
Screen Size, Scale, and Experiential Impact.” Screens: From Materiality 
to Spectatorship – A Historical and Theoretical Reassessment. Eds. 
Dominique Chateau and José Moure. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 
2016. 247-258.

BLACK, Daniel. “An Aesthetics of the Invisible: Nanotechnology and 
Informatic Matter,” Theory, Culture & Society 31.1 (2014): 99-121.

BRUNET, François. Circulation. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American 
Art & University of Chicago Press, 2017.

CLARKE, Michael, and David WITTENBERG. Scale in Literature and Culture. 
Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

DICAGLIO, Joshua. Scale Theory: A non-Disciplinary Inquiry. Cambridge, 
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2021.

DOANE, Mary-Ann. Bigger than Life: The Close Up and Scale in the Cinema. 
Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2021.

DVORAK, Tomáš, and Jussi PARIKKA. Photography Off the Scale: 
Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image. Edinburgh: Edinburgh 
University Press, 2021.

ELKINS, James. Six Stories from the End of Representation: Images in 
Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics and 
Quantum Mechanics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

HANICH, Julian. The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema 
Experience. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.HESSELBERTH, Pepita, and 
Maria POULAKI, eds. Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of 
the Bit-sized Media. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

HORTON, Zachary. The Cosmic Zoom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
2021.

HUHTAMO, Erki. “Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media 
Displays.” Urban Screens Reader. Eds. Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and 
Sabine Niederer. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009. 15-28.

KENDERDINE, Sarah. “Prosthetic Architectures of the Senses: Museums and 
Immersion.” Screen, 61.4 (2020): 635-645.

STEWART, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, 
the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1992.

TAVERNOR, Robert. Smoot’s Ear: The Measure of Humanity. New Haven, 
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007.

WINSTON, Brian. Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and 
Television. London: British Film Institute, 1996.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------