[ecrea] CFP: No Turning Back: Re-Thinking the Postmodern / XV MAGIS – Gorizia International Film Studies Spring School

Call For Papers
XV MAGIS – Gorizia International Film Studies Spring School
Gorizia, 29 March-1 April 2017

No Turning Back
Re-Thinking the Postmodern

The MAGIS – International Film Studies Spring School will celebrate its 
15th edition by addressing the possible archaeologies and genealogies of 
the “postmodern”, whose framework, despite its hints about the End of 
History (from Lyotard’s “End of Great Narratives” [1979] to Fukuyama’s 
theories [1992]) seems to have today, most of all, a historical value.
In other words, in a moment when the notion of “postmodern” does not 
describe our present time anymore, we are compelled to ask ourselves 
whether the contemporary media landscape still has a name or not. More 
specifically, drawing on the speculations of many scholars and critics, 
such as Raoul Eshelman (2001), Alan Kirby (2006, 2009), and Nicholas 
Bourriaud (2009), who declared that postmodernism and postmodern culture 
have come to an end, we have to answer the following question: how can 
we define the post-postmodern era?
Our main goal, then, is to unravel the theoretical knots concerning the 
postmodern as a historical phenomenon and its aftermath within the 
epistemic frame of film and media studies. We will reflect in particular 
on the following topics: on the one hand, which film and media practices 
should be considered inherently postmodern; how film and media cultures 
developed during the postmodern era; how the political framework of the 
postmodern era (neoliberalism and post-fordism; LGBT movements; third 
wave feminism, etc.) influenced film and media production; and, more 
broadly, how we can imagine a media archaeology of the postmodern. On 
the other, referring to Supplanting the Postmodern (Rudrum and Stavris, 
2015), we will investigate the field of post-postmodernism (mainly 
through the notions of remodernism, performatism, hypermodernism, 
automodernism etc.), opening new ways for the analysis of the 
contemporary film and media landscape, its practical groundwork, and its 
theoretical framework.
Drawing on their own specific disciplinary interests and methodological 
perspectives, the five sections of the School – Cinema and Contemporary 
Arts, Film Heritage, Media Archaeology, Porn Studies, and Post-Cinema – 
will explore different aspects of postmodern (and post-postmodern) 
culture and theory:


Cinema & Contemporary Arts – The End of (Art) History-telling? 
Representing the Historical Past and Historicizing the Past in the Arts 
after the Post Modern

  The Cinema and Contemporary Arts section will directly address the 
ambiguous and problematic meanings underlying  the concept of “history” 
in post-modern thinking. As Hayden White suggested, the postmodernists’ 
dissatisfaction with scientific historiographical narratives led them to 
resort to artistic representation in order to deal with “the aporias of 
historical existence” and “the present as history”. The intervolved 
relations between history and present come to the fore not only when the 
historical past is artistically represented (and re-presented), but also 
when artists (as well as curators, conservators and archivists) have to 
re-enact, re-explore and re-interpret their own or other people’s 
artworks in order to make them accessible (in museums or virtual 
archives) in the present. Within this theoretical framework, we will 
reflect, on the one hand, on how the contemporary arts (institutions, 
curators and artists) have offered an alternative way of 
“History-telling” and at which extent they elicited an active response 
from the audience; on the other hand, we will focus on the ways in which 
audiovisual artworks from the seventies to this day have been 
re-interpreted, re-exposed (and, in a sense, historicized) over time. In 
this respect, the section invites scholars and researchers to explore: 
how visual and sound arts have dealt with a historical subject during 
the last forty years and how “this sense of history” revealed 
similarities or discontinuities with post-modernist theories; the 
different ways in which audio and visual media – in artistic work as 
well as in exhibition design – concur in involving the spectator’s body 
in an alternative account of historical facts; how this sensorial 
engagement could lead to a different, non-text based historical 
knowledge; the possible effects of “non-scientific historiographical 
narratives” when applied to the fields of conservation, preservation and 
(digital) access to Media Art. With these premises, we encourage papers 
that deal with (but are not restricted to) the following topics:
-       “Historiographic turn”: contemporary art and historiographical 
narratives
-       The relationship between history and the arts within 
post-modernist theories
-       Exhibition strategies and the narrative of history
-       Re-enactment and re-presentation of past artworks, performances 
and exhibitions as non-linear historical narratives
-       The relationship between fictional and real accounts in the 
construction of the visual artwork
-       Sound art and the use of archives
-       Sound art and the re-use of historical fragments


The Film Heritage – Migration and post-modern transnational film culture

The so-called ‘end of the great narratives’ identified by Lyotard is 
related to a major change in the knowledge-building and 
knowledge-transmission practices influenced by technological 
transformations. Shaped through socio-cultural models, discourses and 
protocols, those transformations already influenced and were active “in 
human circulation (transportation systems) and […] in the circulation of 
sounds and visual images (the media)” (Lyotard, 1979; 1984). Meanwhile 
Hayden White's observations on the “historical narrative” conflate 
questions of narration and style with strategies and conditions of 
historiography. At the same time, the post-modern era coincided with the 
emergence of post-colonial issues concerning multicultural and 
cross-cultural representational frameworks in which the other (the 
migrant and the exiled, for instance) plays a pivotal role, and with the 
“individuation” of new genealogies of nomadic subjectivities. As far as 
Hollywood is concerned, the concept of postmodernism has been challenged 
by the discourse on post-classical cinema. Drawing on this theoretical 
and historical background, the 2017 edition of the Film Heritage will be 
devoted, on the one hand, to historicizing the interrelationships 
between style, narratives and the migration of authors, professionals, 
and knowledge in the (post-modern) cinema; on the other hand, it will 
strive  to inspire new interpretations of the basic notions linked to 
transnational film cultures along the 20th Century. Furthermore, the 
call aims to reconsider the practices of selection, preservation, and 
access to the new archival and counter-archival film heritage 
established since the 1970s and along post-modernism in the light of 
such concepts as migration, exile, banishment, nomadism, assimilation, 
acknowledgement.


Media Archaeology – Network

In the wake of the “re-thinking postmodern” framework of this MAGIS 
Spring School, the Media Archaeology section invites you to an 
archaeological excavation of the post-Fordist, post-industrial and 
global emergence of the Network(s). As Alexander Galloway and Eugene 
Thacker put it, the network “has emerged as a dominant form describing 
the nature of control today, as well as resistance to it”. What is at 
stake in the post-modern emergence of the network is both the human 
subject and its interactions with the mediasphere – interactions capable 
of building a media environment: in the decline of post-Fordist 
economies, and in the rise of the post-industrial information, the human 
subjects thrive on new forms of network interactions in which their 
integrity is paradoxically threatened. Firstly, our sub-call focuses on 
the ways in which, “by their mere existence, networks are not 
liberating; they exercise novel forms of control that operate at a level 
that is anonymous and non-human, which is to say material.” Secondly, 
drawing on Guattari’s Soft Subversions, we aim to target the 
interrelationships between the machinic networks and the processes of 
subjectivation, more specifically how the first are engaged in the 
latter. Thirdly, drawing on Simondon’s, Stiegler’s, Sobchack’s theories, 
we aim to understand not only how networks entail their subjects, but 
also how networks imply objectification processes and, in turn, how 
object interactions create new network schemata. As we can see, a 
resistant ambiguity permeates the machinic and material nature of the 
networks’ existence and its ontological definition, which constitute the 
core of our subcall and compel us to highlight and retrace the deep time 
veins in the material strata of network(s). Finally we would like to 
encourage proposals on (but not limited to) the following topics:
-       Discursive ensemble of the network
-       Network’s territoriality/extraterritoriality/re-territorialization
-       Object-subject’s network interaction and transfer
-       Network(s) techno-materiality
-       Networks’ schizophrenia
-       Networks’ organology and pharmacology
-       Networks environments and cybernetic networks
-       Network Aesthetics
-       From networks to swarms: insect media, the postmodern and the 
post-postmodern eras.


Porn Studies – Video (R)Evolutions

The aim of the section is to explore the historical impact of video 
technologies on pornographic production, representation and consumption. 
Starting from the second half of the 1980s, the video revolution 
dramatically hit the adult business, changing forever the way in which 
audio-visual pornography was created and experienced. This process 
implied first of all the gradual and relatively quick shift from a 
mostly public form of porn consumption (in movie theatres and arcades) 
to the privacy of home video viewing, and the subsequent total and 
irreversible reconversion to video of the major Western porn companies. 
The expressive possibilities allowed by video technologies also had 
important consequences on the development of new forms of pornographic 
production and representation, such as amateur, gonzo, and feminist 
porn. Drawing on these premises, we invite papers that reflect on:
-       The pornographic video era, from its origins to its developments 
in the digital era
-       Transformations of the feature-length narrative hard-core film 
during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s
-       New pornographic video genres and subgenres
-       Pornography and television, music, fashion
-       Arty porn (Andrew Blake, Michael Ninn, Gregory Dark, …)
-       From film loop to video vignette
-       From wall-to-wall to gonzo
-       Gonzo pioneers (Jamie Gillis, John Stagliano, Rodney Moore, Ed 
Powers, Ben Dover…)
-       Gonzo evolutions, from Buttman to Bang Bros
-       From polaroid and 8mm to the birth of the “video amateur”
-       The birth of alternative pornographies during the 1980s
-       New bodies, races, genders in video and early digital pornography
-       The pioneers of feminist pornography (Femme Productions, Fatale 
Video, …)
-       From the arcade to the video rental shop: changes in 
pornographic consumption and distribution


Post-cinema – VR and AR: a Post-Cinematic Modernity

As computer technologies that replicate an environment, real or 
imagined, and, in different ways, simulate a user's physical presence 
and environment in a way that allows the user to interact with it 
(Isaac, 2016), both Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) 
explore the boundaries between embodiment and immersiveness through a 
primarily haptic experience. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, as 
postmodern and post-cinematic experiences par excellence and expressions 
of postmodernism, challenge all concepts traditionally related to 
representation and expand the notion of reality by restructuring the 
relationship between the user and the medium and by questioning the 
Cartesian notions of time and space in unprecedented ways. In this 
respect, Virtual and Augmented Reality are objects of study that are 
essentially cross- disciplinary and can become less opaque only if 
analysed through a multi-layered toolkit that can be created at the 
crossroads between Film, Media and Game studies, by exploring 
sub-disciplinary approaches such as documentary theory, haptic theory, 
transmediality, network theory, cognitive theory, visual anthropology 
etc. We are particularly interested in analysing these topic in the 
interactive creations, both fictional and non-fictional, like 
interactive documentaries, video games, web series or transmedial 
products. In the Postcinema section of Filmforum 2017, we are interested 
in collecting papers analysing VR and AR and different interactive non 
fictional case studies as well as multiplatform, crossmedia and 
interactive experiences that touch upon the aforementioned theoretical 
questions, hoping to be able to find common grounds and carve out 
analytical tools that will help us focus this expanding field for the 
years to come.

The organizers invite single papers and panel proposals
Deadline for proposals: December 11, 2016
Authors will be notified by January 10, 2016 if their proposals have 
been accepted.
Proposals should not exceed one page in length. Please make sure to 
attach a short CV (10 lines max).
A registration fee (€ 150) will be applied.
Submit proposals to: (goriziafilmforum /at/ gmail.com)

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