[Commlist] CFP - Old and New Science Fiction Imaginaries in English-Speaking Cinema and Television

Duarte Penaranda German Andres would like to share with the the CFP - 
NEW DEADLINE until May the 20th! - for the SERCIA annual conference 
taking place in Milan this year. The event is taking place in September 
2024.

*29th SERCIA CONFERENCE *
*Old and New Science Fiction Imaginaries in English-Speaking Cinema and 
Television *
*La Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano September 2-4, 2024 *
*Keynote speakers: Naomi Mandel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Pawel 
Frelik (University of Warsaw) *
In an interview about the end of the last millennium, James Ballard 
argued that Science Fiction (SF) had created the greatest popular 
literature of the 20th century. The imagery that we saw in the cinema, 
television, advertising and other media was the most powerful imagery 
produced in the last hundred years. By the end of the century, the genre 
had done its job and it was dead. This hypothetical death has aroused a 
widespread interest in the many ways in which it generated a collective 
social imaginary through popular images and stories that, in Ballard’s 
words again, had “created the psychology of the last decades of the 
20th century.” This debate positioned the genre at the centre of 
academic discussions. The result was that SF, previously seen as a minor 
genre, became an important lens to understand not only the 20th century 
but the new millennium as well. Throughout the 20th century, SF 
territorialised the future and, by extension, familiarised people with a 
large number of technologies and phenomena that have now become standard 
in our current mediascape and social context. In other words, by 
territorialising the future, the genre had built the present.
Ballard’s statement implied that the genre was now no longer able to 
continue to produce the imagery of the future or, as Vivian Sobchack 
argued, it had lost its ability “to reconcile man with the unknown.” And 
yet, over the course of the first quarter of the 21st century, we have 
witnessed a huge increase in the general interest in SF stories. This 
increase also encouraged the reformulation of some foundational SF 
stories: the adaptation of literary texts to the screen – /Minority 
Report /(2002), /The Handmaid’s Tale /(2017-), /Altered Carbon 
/(2018-20), /Dune /(2021, 2024) – or from the big screen to TV – 
/Westworld /(2016-22) –, as well as remakes and sequels of earlier films 
and series – /Battlestar Gallactica /(2003, 2009, 2012), /Total Recall 
/(2012), /Mad Max: Fury Road /(2015), /Blade Runner 2049 /(2017) and 
/The Matrix Resurrections /(2021). At the same time, the first quarter 
of the 21st century has also been a rich and fertile period for the 
production of new SF stories, some of them originating in literature, 
like Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, adapted as /Arrival /(2016), 
others directly conceived for the big screen, like /Children of Men 
/(2006), /Moon /(2009), /Interstellar /(2014), /Avatar /(2009) and its 
sequel (2022) and /High Life /(2018), and successful global TV series 
like /Utopia /(2013-14), /Black Mirror /(2011-) and /Stranger Things 
/(2016-), among many others.
The 29th SERCIA Annual Conference intends to celebrate SF, both in its 
manifold 21st-century manifestations /and /by commemorating the old and 
long relationship between the genre and the cinematic image, from George 
Méliès’ /A Trip to the Moon /(1902) to current ergodic and interactive 
narratives such as /Bandersnatch /(2018). We, therefore, welcome not 
only studies of contemporary audiovisual manifestations of the genre but 
also critical re-evaluations of 20th- century landmarks. We would also 
like to extend the debate to the analysis of different forms of 
speculative audiovisual fiction in order to better understand the ways 
in which the two main instruments for the production of the social 
imaginary of the last century (film and SF) have familiarised us with 
technological devices, dystopian social scenarios, high-tech posthuman 
realities, extraterrestrial presences and non-material digital 
universes. In other words, we propose to explore the ways in which SF 
and the filmic image imagined the future during the last century and, in 
so doing, generated our present time and sparked our own future-directed 
imaginations.
We encourage proposals dealing with the following issues from a variety 
of perspectives (aesthetic, cultural, economic, historical, etc.) in 
English-speaking films and series of the new millennium:

 1. - The history of SF, exploring and celebrating the enduring
    relationship between SF and film, the inscription of contemporary
    films and series in the aesthetic and ideological traditions of the
    genre, notably through comparative studies between literature and
    film, or between new and canonic works, as well as new perspectives
    on the classics of the genre.
 2. - Mapping the present time, imagining the future: we encourage
    proposals that deal with the ways in which the future is imagined
    (and imaged) through SF. This is to say, how, in the course of the
    last century, SF territorialized our present time and, by extension,
    populated our daily lives with themes and devices that build our
    present reality. We would like to discuss the ways cinema depicted
    the future in the past.
 3. - Reformulating the genre: new media technologies generate
    transmedia and adaptative phenomena that naturally modify genres.
     From this perspective, proposals could analyze diverse forms of
    speculative fiction and/or attempt to identify new narrative forms
    and to map, in the genre’s universe, new topoi that could be
    identified as new declensions of SF.
 4. - Adaptation, analyzing the ways in which the complex narrative
    structure of SF is adapted to the screen. Proposals that enquire
    into the transition of certain technological devices from a textual
    dimension to the image are also welcome.
 5. - Cyberpunk: we would like to open a space for the discussion of
    social problems and phenomena related to technological developments.
    We encourage scholars to deal with the main topics of cyberpunk, and
    to identify them in our current audiovisual production. We welcome
    analyses of the ways that the main cyberpunk topoi (e.g., dystopia,
    A.I. societal collapse, among others) have been reformulated after
    the Digital Revolution.
 6. - Theoretical formulations and re-formulations of the genre, its
    limits and its intersections with other genres are also welcome.
*Send proposals to German A. Duarte ((GDuarte /at/ unibz.it)) and Celestino 
Deleyto ((cdeleyto /at/ unizar.es)). Deadline. May 20, 20024. *
**
_https://careof.org/news/sercia-cfp-deadline-update 
<https://careof.org/news/sercia-cfp-deadline-update>_
**
*Prospective participants are advised that, in order to participate in 
the conference, they must previously become members of SERCIA. Go to 
**_http://www.sercia.net/index.php/how-to-join-sercia 
<http://www.sercia.net/index.php/how-to-join-sercia>_*or contact 
*(_mariannekacvergne /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(mariannekacvergne /at/ gmail.com)>_*
**
*Scientific Committee: Delphine Letort, David Roche, Marianne Kac- 
Vergne, Christophe Gelly, Pablo Gómez, Julia Echeverría, German A. 
Duarte, Celestino Deleyto. *



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