[Commlist] cfp: 2020 Revelation Academic Conference

*SUBJECT: REMINDER- CFP REVELATION ACADEMIC CONFERENCE, 9-10 JULY 2020, 
Perth, Western Australia*

/Revelation Perth International Film Festival and /

/Curtin University’s School of Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry 
present /

**

*2020 Revelation Academic Conference*

/21^st Century Screen Media: Ruptures and Continuities/

//

Perth Cultural Centre, Perth, Western Australia

9-10 July 2020

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

The late 19^th century’s technological race saw inventors like Lumiere, 
Edison, and Friese-Greene compete to create a functional mechanical 
device that would actualise the cinematic concept entertained at least 
since the invention of photography. This quest was in fact already 
energised by ancient visual tales and visual trickery shows based on the 
manipulation of light, shadow, and reflection. From Plato’s cave to 
Muybridge’s chronophotography, moving images existed centuries before 
the development of the photographic and cinematic technologies that 
would so dramatically shape modern experience.

Well past the commemoration of cinema’s centenary in 1996 and the advent 
of the third millennium, moving images are incontrovertibly an essential 
constituent of contemporary culture and subjectivity, but the ways we 
make, use, exhibit, share and trade them today have changed dramatically 
since the heyday of cinema theatres and television living rooms. With 
the rapid development of interactive, portable, smart, autonomous and 
immersive technologies of media and visualisation, including the 
internet, drones and virtual reality, cinema and television as we knew 
them until relatively recently have not only been undermined but 
allegedly reached their natural course. But is this so? Are we living 
through a transitional post-cinema, post-media, big-data period in which 
networked, interactive technologies of expanded sensory experience are 
increasingly replacing a still active but definitively atavistic screen 
culture? Or are traditional screen forms and concepts repositioning 
themselves within the emergent technological landscape? Did the cinema 
experience already prefigure through its myriad forms, genres, and 
approaches the essential aspects of the XR technology increasingly 
dominating today’s media culture just like the premise of shadow puppet 
or magic lantern shows could be sensed in the earliest screenings of 
celluloid films?

Writing in 1999, film and media scholar Malcolm Le Grice gauged that 
experimental film had indeed prefigured the essential elements of the 
innovative computer art and digital cinema of the 1990s, namely, 
narrative non-linearity; transformative images; and interactive and 
expanded viewer experience. In Le Grice’s words: “the concepts embodied 
in the computer as a technology have emerged together in parallel with 
other contemporary philosophical, conceptual or aesthetic developments” 
(2001, 319-320).

Taking place at the start of the century’s third decade, the /2020 
Revelation Academic Conference -/ /21st Century Screen Media: Ruptures 
and Continuities/ will be held in conjunction with two highly 
significant events: the 23rd /Revelation International Film Festival/ 
and the 2^nd /XR-WA/. Seeking to create a space of reflection and 
discussion about philosophical, cultural and technological continuities 
and discontinuities within screen culture and industry, the conference 
organisers invite national and international proposals from scholars, 
researchers, creative practitioners, postgraduate students, cultural 
workers and cinephiles for 20-min papers, 5-min provocations and 5-min 
(or less) screen works. Proposals for panels of three presenters are 
also encouraged. Provocations and screen works will be presented 
alongside academic papers and/or in special screenings, displays and 
performances. The conference organisers welcome approaches from across 
the humanities and social sciences, as well as engagements with screen 
media and culture in areas of design, built environment, science and 
technology.

The following are potential topics but any other relevant ones are also 
acceptable:

- moving images: practice/cultural transitions in the 21st Century
- the visual turn and the affect turn within immersive visualisation media

- technological, theoretical, socio-historical ruptures and continuities
- obituaries: cinema, television, screen, DVD, video libraries, video stores
- atavisms and reconstructions in screen theory/education in the 
post-theory, post-media age

- futures: screen genres, narrative, writing, directing, performance
- internet cinema and television
- screen audiences: old, new, emergent
- from Industry to industries: collapsing, converging, emerging 
production, distribution and consumption models, old and new
- forms of interactivity, immersiveness, multi/inter/trans/hybrid-media 
in visual and screen arts, old and new
- art/science visualisation experiments
- 3D/VR/XR: affect, ethics, politics, ideology, genres, creative 
methodologies

- drones, satellite and other surveillance vision in cinema, television 
and the web

- iCameras, GoPros, smartphones, iPads: small image capture cultures

- screen commercial innovations; screen jobs of the past and the future

- film & media collectives and alternative 21^st century models of 
screen collaboration

- viral video, memes and sharable content

- evolving/emerging fan and celebrity cultures

- politics of representation, identity and diversity on 21^st century 
screens: case studies

- indigenous and community cinema and television in the age of the internet

- national cinema and television in a post-nation age of mass migration

- third cinema and political media activism in the age of big-data and 
the internet

- the future of the auteur and art house cinema

- the future of film festivals and cinephilia

- experimental cinema in the digital age

- the life and times (and futures) of film, TV & sound archives

- cinema, television and total media: big-data, climate change and the 
Anthropocene

- the evolution and future of gaming

*Abstracts/Synopsis due: Monday 10^th February 2020*

Send a 250-word abstract/synopsis and 50-word author biography to: Dr 
Kath Dooley & Dr Antonio Traverso:(MCASIAdmin /at/ curtin.edu.au) 
<mailto:(MCASIAdmin /at/ curtin.edu.au)>

For further information, please contact Dr Kath Dooley: 
(kath.dooley /at/ curtin.edu.au) <mailto:(kath.dooley /at/ curtin.edu.au)>

Please note that the papers presented may be considered for publication 
in a journal special issue or edited collection after the conference.

For more information on the /Revelation Perth International Film 
Festival/ see: https://www.revelationfilmfest.org/

XR:WA https://xrwa.com.au/

*References*

Le Grice, Malcolm (2001). /Experimental cinema in the digital age/. 
London: British Film Institute.

/Revelation Perth International Film Festival /and/Curtin University 
/acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Custodians of theland on 
which we work and live, the Noongar Whadjuk People, andto their elders 
past, present and emerging.

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