[ecrea] Call for Papers and Creative Works - InVisible Culture, Issue 22: "Opacity"

“Opacity” - Issue 22



For its twenty-second issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal 
for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that 
address the multiple meanings of opacity.



In the spring of 2013, former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden 
began releasing documents pertaining to the wide-ranging data collection 
methods of the National Security Agency. Alternately hailed as hero and 
traitor, Snowden’s actions have fueled intense public debate regarding 
issues of privacy and transparency. For Issue 22, we would like 
contributors to consider the tension between transparency and opacity 
and reflect on the cultural and political contexts that gave rise to 
their connotations of openness and secrecy. What does it mean to claim 
either as a right? The late writer, poet, and critic Édouard Glissant 
(1928-2011) developed a model of opacity as a means of creating ethical 
relationships, writing in Poetics of Relation, “Transparency no longer 
seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected 
the world in its own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the 
mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations.” How could opacity be 
used as a tool of resistance? What stakes are involved in the revelation 
or obscuring of artworks’ racial, cultural, or gendered origins? How 
might we imagine opacity to be useful or limiting to the work of visual 
culture?



We also seek to address optical properties of opacity more broadly as a 
conceptual tool for approaching medium specificity, innovations in color 
theory, and other subjects. Does our understanding of opacity shift in 
regard to digital technologies as it may between cultural spheres and 
political territories? How might visual culture be invested in the 
theoretical and physical properties of opacity and transparency?



We welcome papers and artworks that further the various understandings 
of opacity. Possible topics of exploration include, but are not limited to:



?     Aesthetic and political dimensions of transparency and opacity

?     Identity politics, “the right to opacity”

?     Privacy and visibility, surveillance

?     The “transparent society” and digital panopticism

?     Scientific and medical visualization, the body, big data

?     Opacity of architectural traditions

?     Liminal spaces, borders, zones of conflict

?     Transparency and globalization, geopolitics

?     Emerging, established, and decaying democracies

?     Politics of clothing, fabric, screens, interstitial space and material

?     Camera obscura/lucida, properties of darkness and light, color, 
pigmentation

?     Transparency and opacity in the plastic arts (painting, film, 
sculpture)

?     Penetration and resistance

Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines 
from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to 
ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com by May 1, 2014. Inquiries should be 
sent to the same address.



Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting work in 
other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the 
theme as it is outlined above. For questions or more details concerning 
acceptable formats, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or 
contact ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com.



Reviews
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, 
exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). To submit a review 
proposal, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact 
ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com.



Blog
The journal also invites submissions to its blog feature, which will 
accommodate more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. 
For further details, please contact us at 
ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject heading “blog 
submission.”



* InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a 
student run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in 
an open access format. Through peer reviewed articles, creative works, 
and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore 
changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog 
across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.




InVisible Culture
503A Morey Hall
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627

http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu

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