[csaa-forum] CFP 2020 Revelation Academic Conference

[Antonio Traverso]

Revelation Perth International Film Festival and
Curtin University's School of Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry present

2020 Revelation Academic Conference
21st Century Screen Media: Ruptures and Continuities

Perth Cultural Centre, Perth, Western Australia
9-10 July 2020


CALL FOR PAPERS

The late 19th 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 2nd 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 21st century models of screen collaboration
- viral video, memes and sharable content
- evolving/emerging fan and celebrity cultures
- politics of representation, identity and diversity on 21st 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 10th 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 the land on which we work and live, the Noongar Whadjuk People, and to their elders past, present and emerging.

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