[ecrea] cfp MEDIA MUTATIONS

MEDIA MUTATIONS 2013: second call for papers

Ephemeral Media: Time, Persistence, and Transience in Contemporary Screen Culture
Organized by Sara Pesce, with Paul Grainge and Roberta Pearson

Bologna,
May, 21 and 22, 2013


Considering the variety of paratextual materials that surround contemporary film and television shows, including trailers, credit sequences, mashups, promos, podcasts, bonus materials and merchandising, it has been suggested that ‘off-screen studies' may be needed in order to make sense of the wealth of other entities that saturate the media, and that construct film and television. This is part of a wider critical move to explore the ‘ephemeral’ texts that exist beyond, below and between the principal entertainment content of media corporations. This symposium looks at the status and significance of paratextual media including those associated with ‘primary’ film and television texts but also promotional texts associated with corporations or events (e.g. the Olympics) and fan produced paratexts related to films, television shows, games, media icons and the like.  Considering these paratexts raises issues ranging from the increasing role that short-form content has assumed in
 media culture to the way that platforms like YouTube have enabled paratexts from the past to become more permanent and accessible by vastly increasing the opportunities for their distribution and remediation.

This focus on paratexts gives rise to broader concerns with the temporalities of media within the digital environment, and specifically the duration and circulation of media objects. New regimes of memory and attention may be arising within the digital mediascape. On the one hand, the growth of digital channels and platforms has seen a proliferation of temporally compressed media (those lasting seconds or minutes) geared towards mobile audiences whose attentions are more fleeting and dispersed. On the other hand, the rise of archives like YouTube and Google has enabled media images and performances to live on and be shared and reworked indefinitely by viewing communities. By focusing on the short, secondary and seemingly insubstantial texts that fill the gaps between media, the 2013 Media Mutations conference considers the cultural life of paratexts, and the relation of ‘ephemeral,’ ‘peripheral’ and ‘ancillary’ media to contemporary narrative and temporal ecologies.

The conference is interested in, but not limited to, the following issues as they relate to paratextual media

·Media environments – What is the relation of paratexts to continuities/changes in the media landscape?
- How do paratexts produce changes within media ecosystems? How do they work as agents of stability inside media ecosystems?

·Durational temporalities - What is the role of short-form content within contemporary media culture?
-How are paratexts linked to corporate, media or audience strategies for capturing attention in a world where an increasing abundance of consumer goods is part of a cycle of ever shorter renewal and disposal?

·Circulatory temporalities – How do paratexts operate historically within media’s circulatory systems? Did they operate differently in the past than in the present?
- How do paratexts, from the present and the past, surround and shape the meaning of texts, brands and intellectual properties?
- What is the relationship of paratexts to processes of competition and authentication of cultural memory, and to the nostalgia for a remembered past? How might they relate to the discussion of the categories of the dominant, the emergent and the residual as they have been adopted by cultural studies and memory studies?

·Critical methodologies – What are the means and possibilities of studying texts that fall outside the analytic focus of film and broadcast archives?
- How do these new textual forms raise issues concerning their cultural validation?


Keynote speaker Jonathan Gray, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The publishing house Peter Lang has expressed interest in a volume of conference proceedings.

The organizers invite abstracts (300/400 words) plus a brief  c.v
Extended deadline for abstracts: March 8, 2013
Submit abstracts (written in English) to:(sara.pesce /at/ unibo.it)<mailto:(sara.pesce /at/ unibo.it)>
Abstracts will be blind reviewed
Official languages: Italian and English
Presentation will not exceed 20 minutes
Notification of acceptance by: March 17, 2013

Further information about  MEDIA MUTATIONS at:www.mediamutations.org





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