CFP: Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture
International Symposium in Visual Culture
Bah=C3=A7e=C5=9Fehir University, Faculty of Communications, Department of
Photography and Video
20, 21 May 2011
Deadline: 31.3.2011
Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture, the first of a series of
international symposia on visual culture to be held at Bah=C3=A7e=C5=9Fehir
University, =C4=B0stanbul, aims to enable discussion and debate on topics
critical in the conceptualization, analysis, evaluation of and
intervention in visual culture today.
Once apparently marginal, critical debate in visual culture over
mobility, actual, virtual and imaginary, has become crucial to
formulating positions both in relation to changes in communications
technologies and in social and political relations. Digital visual
technologies, it is claimed, have multiplied the sites of viewing,
shifting audiences from positions of passive receptivity, associated
with discourses of modern visual culture, into a series of modes of
interaction. Yet, it is also argued that the encoding of kinaesthetic
responsiveness in such forms of interaction represents a more thorough
penetration of imaginative activities than ever before
Contributions are thus sought from scholars working in visual studies,
in the history and theory of art, photographic, film, video and/or
media studies that engage with issues of actual, virtual and imaginary
modes of mobility in relation to images, still, moving and
interactive, across modern and/or postmodern frameworks. We are
particularly interested in ways in which the thinking of mobility in
visual culture implicates issues of boundaries, borders and limits
and, given the situation of the University overlooking Asian from
European Istanbul, we invite contributions that concern that critical
form of actual and imaginary mobility, orientalism, along with
neo-orientalist variants and modes of resistant counter-orientalist
practice. Contributions that address dominant, but also repressed,
residual and/or emergent senses of space are also encouraged.
Further priorities may emerge from a range of topics that include the follo=
wing:
Histories and theorizations of mobile spectatorship, e.g. flaneurism,
the d=C3=A9rive, lines of flight
Mass and other forms of mobilization
Figures of immobility in accounts of modern and/or postmodern mass
culture, e.g. spectacle and passivity
Monocularity, binocularity and complexifications of perspectival space
Forms of surveillance and counter-surveillance
Temporality and movement in film and video
Territoriality, deterritorialization, reterritorialization and the image
Intra-corporeal and endoscopic visualities
Satellite and network visualities
Simulation and mobility
New media, mobility and fantasy
Digital interactivity, kinaesthesia and the image
Mobility and fantasy in gaming
Mobile screen visualities, fantasy and sociability
Histories and theorizations of mobile authorship
Reading mobile corporeality across visual forms
Transgression and mobility
Theorising fantasy, identification and mobility
Distanciation and mobility
Posing, performativity and mobility
Borders, boundaries, limits and mobility
The symposium will seek to formulate useful positions in thinking the
history and futures of visual culture, modes of critical engagement
with the increasing variety of visual technologies, in particular
mobile ones, and the problematics of actual and imaginary mobility in
relation to rhetorics and actualities of globalization.
The symposium will involve 5 or 6 consecutive sessions of three 25
minute papers, and 5 concurrent sessions of five 15 minute papers.
Currently it is envisaged that there will be sessions, of both longer
and shorter presentations, on: still images; moving images;
interactive images; fantasy and mobility; and borders, boundaries and
limits.
Please send proposals of up to 350 words indicating which session your
presentation would be best suited and whether the presentation would
be for 25 or for 15 minutes (or whether it could be either) to
(mobilityandfantasy /at/ gmail.com).
Travel and accommodation assistance is available for contributors
under 35 years of age, up to a maximum of 350 TL [approx. 160 =D0=84] so
please also indicate if you wish to be considered for financial
support.
Contact: Lewis Johnson or Tolga Hepdin=C3=A7ler
Bah=C3=A7e=C5=9Fehir University
Faculty of Communication
Department of Photography and Video
C=C4=B1ra=C4=9Fan Caddesi, Be=C5=9Fikta=C5=9F
34353 Istanbul
Turkey
0090 (0) 212 381 0446 or 0765
(mobilityandfantasy /at/ gmail.com)
Symposium website: mfvc.bahcesehir.edu.tr
