[Previous message][Next message][Back to index]
[Commlist] Conference call: the picturesque: visual pleasure and intermediality in-between contemporary cinema, art and digital culture
Sat Mar 23 07:33:28 GMT 2019
THE PICTURESQUE: VISUAL PLEASURE AND INTERMEDIALITY IN-BETWEEN
CONTEMPORARY CINEMA, ART AND DIGITAL CULTURE
25-26 October, 2019, Sapientia University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Continuing our series of conferences dedicated to rethinking
intermediality in contemporary cinema and visual culture, we propose to
initiate a discussion around aspects of intermediality that may unfold
from the perspective of the picturesque.
The much-debated notion inherited from the art theories of the late 18th
century originally denoted both an aesthetic quality (something pleasing
to the eye situated between the serenely beautiful and the awe-inspiring
sublime) and a particular visual impression (something that looks like a
picture in nature). It anticipated and later became deeply entangled
with many of the ideas of Romanticism, of modernity and postmodernity by
shifting the appeal of images from knowledge to imagination, sensation
and mood, by applying the frame of art to life, or the frame of one art
to another, and emphasising the abstract aesthetic value of a kind of
pictured vision. Photography appropriated it as a strategy of so-called
pictorialism and popular culture perpetuated it in various forms of
spectacularization from the early dioramas and panoramas to today’s
ubiquitous digital screens through which we continually reframe our
lives in picturesque images.
The picturesque emerges therefore not only as a transversal concept in
art history or visual culture, but also essentially connected to issues
of intermediality and in-betweenness that we would like to bring into
focus. In a “beautifully circular” dynamics (Rosalind Krauss), in a
“conjunction of nature, picture, eye” (Geoffrey Batchen) a given moment
of the perceptual array is connected to recognizable patterns in a
picture which always reveals the form of one medium perceived in another
(e.g. painterly tableaux in photography, film, installation art,
photographic frames in film, photos that look like film stills, etc.).
As such, the picturesque directs our attention to the sensuous aspects
of intermediality and their relevance in our so-called postmedia age,
when the “photographic”, “the cinematic” or the “painterly” can be
seamlessly merged through digital technologies.
We would also like to address the controversial aesthetics of the
intermedial picturesque that foregrounds instead of a sublime
Gesamtkunstwerk-like effect the sheer visual pleasure of imageness, and
to highlight its range in this respect from the decorative and the
playful to the contemplative. Keeping in mind the potentially
“troublesome” aspects of “pretty” images (Rosalind Galt), we encourage
proposals to consider their “politics” as well, which can either align
with what John Ruskin described as the “heartlessness of the
picturesque” (i.e. delighting in images of ruin and decay), or can imply
a reflexive acknowledgement of their underlying tensions between art and
life (by engaging Raymond Bellour’s and Laura Mulvey’s “pensive spectator”).
Accordingly, we invite proposals to explore the variety of intermedial
strategies that generate visual pleasures associated with the
picturesque in a broad sense, and to uncover their intricate relations
of in-betweenness.
We suggest the following topics (but welcome any relevant approach to
the issues outlined in the CFP):
The tableau vivant as a visual attraction between high art and popular
culture, and in-between painting, photography, sculpture, theatre and film
Synaesthetic pleasures: picturesque impressions in conjunction with
tactility, soundscape and music
Picturesque landscapes in slow cinema, slow TV and experimental films
Media reflexivity and the picturesque in contemporary documentary and
essay films
Moving image installations and the immersiveness of picturesque images
The picturesque world and the ruins of civilization: nature versus
culture in images of the anthropocene
Painterly images and remediations in heritage films and bio-pics
Gender and postcolonial perspectives of the picturesque intersecting
with intermediality
The picturesque in-between the analogue and the digital, the natural and
the artificial
Theorising what “looks like a picture” today
The intermedial visual pleasures of VR
The picturesque and the spectacular in video games
Confirmed keynote speakers:
STEVEN JACOBS (Department of Art History, Ghent University), an art
historian specialized in the relations between film and the visual arts.
His research interests include the visualization of architecture,
cities, and landscapes in film and photography. He is the author of: The
Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing
Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), The Dark Galleries: A Museum
Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir (2013, with Lisa Colpaert) as
well as the co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017),
and The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity
Between the Wars (2018).
LAURA MULVEY (Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck,
University of London), one of the most influential film theorists of our
time. Her major works include: Visual and Other Pleasures (1989/2009),
Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye (1996/2013), Citizen
Kane (BFI Classics series 1992/2012), Death 24x a Second: Stillness and
the Moving Image (2006), together with groundbreaking articles on
narrative film, feminist film theory, the aesthetics of stillness in the
moving image, etc. She is also an avant-garde filmmaker who co-wrote and
co-directed with Peter Wollen and Mark Lewis several experimental essay
films.
Submission of proposals:
We invite proposals both for individual papers and for pre-constituted
panels. Panels may consist of 3 speakers.
Deadline for the submission of proposals: July 15, 2019.
Please fill in one of the SUBMISSION FORMS:
INDIVIDUAL SUBMISSION: https://goo.gl/forms/9rvw9Ne6yCL090o33
PANEL SUBMISSION: https://goo.gl/forms/bMxYFJqvqCIpb3ja2
The official language of the conference is English. The time for
presentations is limited to maximum 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute
debate.
Conference fee (which includes participation, conference buffet and
banquet): 120 EUR, special fee for participants from
post-communist/communist countries: 70 EUR.
A selection of papers based on the conference presentations will be
published in our department’s international, peer reviewed journal (Acta
Universitatis Sapientiae. Film & Media Studies) indexed in several
international databases.
You can contact the organizers at this e-mail address:
(2019.picturesque /at/ gmail.com)
For further information and updates see the official website:
http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/the-picturesque-visual-pleasure-and-intermediality
---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------
[Previous message][Next message][Back to index]