Forwarded from: travis-vo...@uiowa.edu
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 12:38:14 +0000
Subject: ["VisEv"] The Berkeley Conference on Precarious Aesthetics
Call for Papers
The Berkeley Conference on Precarious Aesthetics
UC Berkeley, October 15-17, 2015
The conference will be hosted by Berkeley Center for New Media in collaboration
with the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley and the research project The
Power of the Precarious Aesthetic at
The Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of
Copenhagen.
Submission Deadline: May 1, 2015. See details below.
Confirmed speakers include:
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
Christine Ross, McGill University
Abigail De Kosnik, UC Berkeley
Jeffrey Skoller, UC Berkeley
Jacob Gaboury, Stony Brook University
W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago
"Is it … always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one?
Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?" (Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations)
In spite of technological advances striving for greater clarity and resolution,
visuals that counteract such perfection may never have been more appreciated.
Feature films, photography, documentaries, televisual images, music videos,
video
games, artists’ films and new digital media are currently saturated with
images that, in various ways, are blurred, noisy and non-transparent. They
invite us to see the world, yet at the same time, they obstruct our view, often
to dazzling effect. By operating
at the mercy of bodies and/or technologies that are unstable and liable to
fail, mediation is here rendered precarious. Such cases raise a host of
distinct but related questions such as:
• How can it be that the blurry image is often preferred over the sharp one?
Why is the indistinct image, as suggested by Wittgenstein, “often exactly what
we need”? What might we need such images for? How do they operate in various
domains,
media and genres? How can precarious mediation be deployed to rhetorical,
aesthetic and political effect? How does it potentially inscribe forms of
precarious existence – precarious life?
• How do the transformative repercussions of a digitalized media culture
intersect with the present surge in precarious mediation? How do analogue and
digital media materialities come forth in such cases, and how are relations
between authenticity,
simulation and fakery played out?
• How is the presence of the camera itself inscribed through traces that point
back to its alleged mode of production and the circumstances of recording? How
might the embodied camera inscribe an ethics of the gaze, or trace attitudes
toward
danger and risk for the filming subject and those being filmed? Can the camera
take on a life of its own, be subject to terror, fear or death?
• How does the present surge in precarious mediation relate to more lasting
negotiations of blindness and insight, opacity and transparency, vagueness and
clarity, tactility and opticality, the visible and the invisible? How does it
relate
to tensions between embodied and disembodied modes of perception, suspensions
and prolongations of perception, to doubt, to concealment and to iconoclasm? If
pictures want something, do they now want to hurt themselves, to stage the life
and death of their
media materialities, to boost the lure of their ruinous decay?
The challenge for the delineation of a precarious aesthetics is to understand
the operational logics of precarious mediation, which is why we need to
interrogate this mediation historically, theoretically and philosophically.
We invite explorations of the questions above. These explorations may also
involve issues such as:
• Precarious art and the notion of precarious life
• Intersections of past and present
• Mediated memories and nostalgia
• Mourning and melancholia
• The medium as message
• Hot and cool media
• The attraction of ruinous media
• Perfect imperfection
• Poetic precision
• The enigmatic
• The sublime
• Medial and human error, finitude
• The dynamics between perfection and imperfection
• Contingency and chance
• Bootleg aesthetics
• “Poor images” and the tension between high and low resolution
• Medium-specific noise
• Noise in image and sound, glitch
• Intermedial tensions
• Temporal versus spatial disruptions of mediation
• An erotics of concealment and revelation, in image, sound, narrative
• The dynamic between transparency and opacity
• The dynamic between the disembodied and embodied camera gaze
• The dynamic between the omniscient and the situated camera gaze
• Uses of extra-diegetic versus diegetic cameras
• The camera as an actor that can live and die
• The appeal of chaos
• Epistemological and poetic vagueness
• Finitude, obsolescence
Beyond the conference in October selected papers will be invited to take part
in a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture as well as an edited book.
Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 350 words, 3-5 bibliographic
sources and an author bio no longer than 100 words. Proposals must be submitted
no later than May 1, 2015. Notification will follow within two weeks. Send to
precariousaestheticsc...@gmail.com
Inquiries can be sent to Arild Fetveit at precariousaestheticsc...@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
FrameWorks mailing list
FrameWorks@jonasmekasfilms.com
https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
