[Commlist] CFP - "Figuring the Invisible" International Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS

Figuring the Invisible. Animation and Science Outreach in Contemporary 
Audio-Visual Culture
International Conference

November 20-21, 2024
Università degli Studi di Padova
Department of Cultural Heritage
MSCA Global Research Project FICTA SciO

Deadline: October 10th, 2024
For enquiries about the conference: (marco.bellano /at/ unipd.it) and 
(simone.evangelista /at/ phd.unipd.it)

The use of animated models and simulations in contemporary science 
outreach poses a major epistemological problem. This especially pertains 
the visualisations of the “invisible” sides of reality: they are mostly 
offered to the audience “as they are”, without any warning that they are 
based on non-optical evidence. Because of this, they get misunderstood 
for true-to-nature representations, and as such they circulate also in 
audio-visual entertainment, reinforcing the wrong belief that those 
object would exactly look like that, if they were to be seen by the 
human eye. This contributed to establish a widespread audio-visual 
vocabulary of “invisible” science, whose growing expansion due to the 
new availability and affordability of creative tools (including 
generative AI) foregrounds complex problems of transparency, as well as 
of communication and scientific ethics.

Awareness about the communicative problems of modelling and animating 
invisible realities started in the second half of the 20th century, when 
the narration of scientific progress became increasingly involved with 
concepts, theories, and entities which were completely incomparable with 
the experiences of everyday life; they included the DNA (1953), the 
Quarks (1969), and the Black Holes, which became popular in 1964-1974, 
the «golden age of general relativity», as Kip Thorne called it (Thorne 
2003: 80). Animation was almost immediately identified as an ideal tool 
to meet the new needs of scientific communication, because of its 
virtually boundless capacity in abstraction and visualisation (Honess 
Roe 2013: 8; Bissonnette 2014: 142).

The rendition of invisible and unreachable sides of reality called for a 
growing presence of artistic licenses, encouraged by producers and 
journalists from the start of the 80s, when science outreach took «a 
particular shift towards an ‘entertainment orientation’» (Campbell 2016: 
8). In line with this, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) 
identified a shift from «representation» to «presentation» in visual 
science outreach. In their analysis, the visual strategies based on 
«truth-to-nature» and mechanical objectivity give way to a form of 
interpretation, a «trained judgment». Interactivity, a major feature of 
contemporary animation (video games; augmented, mixed, virtual reality) 
is both a feature and a consequence of this: trained judgement invites 
the creation of an «image-as-process», and not just of an image which 
documents a process of scientific relevance; the image itself becomes 
relevant, as it can be directly manipulated by the end user: «With 
clicks and keystrokes, these digital images are meant to be used, cut, 
correlated, rotated, colored». The multimediality of contemporary 
science outreach, in this respect, is a very powerful learning tool, but 
also something that overshadows the presence of «trained judgment» not 
only in the visuals itself, but also in the user interface that 
predetermines the interaction and the responses within the simulation.

As Malcolm Cook, Michael Cowan and Scott Curtis argued (2023) in their 
discussion about usefulanimation, a wide category encompassing also the 
communication of science, «investigating useful animation is necessarily 
an interdisciplinary endeavour as it incorporates methods and knowledge 
from intersecting fields, including the histories of science, 
advertising and education». The International Conference “Figuring 
Invisibile” seeks such an interdisciplinary approach, inviting 
contributions about the animation of “invisibile” science after 1980, 
coming from field such as (but not limited to):

- the scientific areas referenced by the animations: astrophysics, 
atomic physics, palaeontology, medical sciences, biology, and so on;
- scientific communication and journalism;
- philosophy and ethics of science;
- animation practice;
- data visualisation.

The audio-visual products to discuss can include:

- documentary films for cinema, TV, home video and the Internet;
- science-based animated simulations or representations of research 
results featured in fictional
films;
- user-edited scientific content for social media;
- interactive content and applications.

The “Figuring the Invisibile” Conference is funded by the European 
Commission as part of the MSCA global research project FICTA SciO 
(https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101063803), aiming to identify and 
raise awareness about the audiovisual conventions and communication 
tactics of animation in multimedia science outreach. The host 
institution is the Department of Cultural heritage at the University of 
Padua, Italy (https://www.beniculturali.unipd.it/www/homepage/); the 
partner institutions are the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and 
Arts (HSLU) (https://www.hslu.ch/en/) and the CICAP - Comitato Italiano 
per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze 
(https://www.cicap.org/n/index.php),

The Conference is a continuation of the EU funded International 
Conference “Figuring the Invisibile. The Role of Animation in the 
Communication of Scientific Knowledge”, HSLU, December 15-16, 2023.

The conference proceedings will be published as an edited collection on 
Open Research Europe (https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/), the 
open access publishing venue for European Commission-funded researchers, 
peer-reviewed and indexed in databases such as Scopus and PubMed.

Presentations will have a maximum length of 20 minutes each. It is 
possible to submit a panel proposal, with three to four speakers. In 
person attendance is encouraged, but online presentations will also be 
possible.

The deadline for your proposal (max. 300 words, .doc, .docx, .pages or 
.pdf; please include also three to five bibliographic references, three 
to five keywords and a short bio of 150 words) is October 10th. Please 
send your proposals to (marco.bellano /at/ unipd.it) and 
(simone.evangelista /at/ phd.unipd.it), specifying in your file if you want to 
present in person or online.

The conference language will be English.

Scientific Board
Prof. Rosamaria Salvatore, Università degli Studi di Padova
Prof. Alessandro Faccioli, Università degli Studi di Padova
Prof. Axel Vogelsang, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Prof. Sergio Della Sala, University of Edinburgh; CICAP
Prof. Christian Uva, Università degli Studi di Roma Tre
Dr. Cristina Formenti, Università degli Studi di Udine; President - 
Society for Animation Studies
Dr. Marco Bellano, Università degli Studi di Padova - MSCA Fellow

Organising Board
Prof. Farah Polato, Università degli Studi di Padova
Prof. Giulia Lavarone, Università degli Studi di Padova
Francesca Berti, Università degli Studi di Padova
Simone Evangelista, Università degli Studi di Padova
Dr. Marco Bellano

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