2011 World Picture Conference
Keynote speakers: Lorenz Engell, Bauhaus University, Weimar
October 4, 2010 The Editors of World Picture--like so many of us in the humanities--are outraged by the continuing efforts in
U.S and the U.K. by upper administrations everywhere to systematically decimate humanities programs, without the slightest bit of concern for
the lives of faculty members and the future of non-instrumental thoughtfulness that has always been the aim of those of us
who teach art, literature, history, film, television, philosophy, and language. The foreign language departments at SUNY Albany are the most recent victims and are in need of our awareness and help: www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/04/albany.
Rendering the Visible Conference The doctoral program in Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University welcomes paper proposals for a meta-disciplinary conference on the state of "the digital turn.” Call-for-Paper Proposal Deadline: Keynote Speakers: One of the most pressing questions facing studies of the image today is how to theorize visuality as more and more moving images are given over to the digital. This conference proposes that the notion of "rendering" might provide a useful entrée for an exploration of theoretical continuities and discontinuities in our understanding of the technologically reproduced image, from Benjamin's "Short History of Photography" to CGI. With regard to image and sound, "rendering" has both a technical and a theoretical currency. It is a term that emphasizes layering, enveloping, and reversibility. In the processing of the image, rendering has the technical sense of the application to a sketch of various effects of "luminance" (transparency, translucency, etc.) under the assumption that light doesn't simply "strike" the object, but rather "envelops" it. Michel Chion relates "rendering" to sound theory with his notion of "rendu" which describes the spectator as being "seized" by an immersive sonic environment. If "rendering" presents us with a "point of no return" (in which layers must be permanently merged), it simultaneously implies the slippery act of bringing into being. That is, when understood as a process, "rendering" shifts our attention to reversibility, oscillation, and becoming of the visual, which occur prior to the moment in which image layers are filled. In this way, "rendering" emphasizes not the image but the image-state, which takes the digital as its "raw material" and embodies it, analogizes it, and thickens it in new and uniquely post-cinematlc (and theoretically post-classical) ways. The inbetweenness of "rendering" may offer ways to understand new affects of visual images (across the photochemical and the digital) and their hybrid ontologies. The conference organizers offer "rendering" as only one provocative tool but welcome paper proposals using any number of frameworks to consider how the digital turn might reconfigure fundamental ("classical") concepts such as inscription, photogénie, the punctum, the gaze, the body, materiality, aura, analogy, contingency, the Virtual, the archive, the uncanny, the labor of imaging, indexicality, visuality, visibility, and decay, as well as how "rendering" or, indeed, other innovative theoretical tools might enable us to think through more recent concepts such as reversibility, the fold, becoming, topological figures, post-humanism, the interface, and the glitch. Send paper proposals (300-500 words) & brief biography by 15 September 2010 to movingimagestudies@gmail.com Queries can be directed to conference organizers Angelo Restivo, Alessandra Raengo, or Jennifer Barker
ReSET Call for Participants Introduction to Philosophy and Media: General Issues. The central issue of this session will be to think about the many ways in which the moving image can be understood as a form of mediation. During this session a range of theories and concepts will be discussed including those of (but not limited to) Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Luc Nancy and others. The Moving Image: Epistemology, Aesthetics, Archaeology. This session will be dedicated to considering questions of medium specificity. The following questions will be discussed: How might one speak of medium-specificity in the digital age? How can one speak of historical, cultural, or even spatial specificity in media studies without doing so? What role has the rhetoric of specificity played in shaping the way we think about media? And what insight might an interrogation of this rhetoric lend to these ways of thinking—or to new ways of thinking—if specificity has formed a conceptual blind spot for media scholarship? In this phase of the project we will draw insights from a range of philosophers who write about the relationship between representation and singularity—such as Alain Badiou—but also cutting-edge media scholars such as Anna McCarthy, Mark Hansen, and D.N. Rodowick. Internet and Digital Media: Philosophy of the Virtual. During this session we will focus on one of the most significant questions for the 21st century: how is human identity changed through the emergence of the Internet? We will consider the question of the Internet in light of discourses that relate questions of cosmopolitanism to the theme of virtuality—as in the work of Paolo Virno, Arjun Appadurai, Dilip Gaonkar, Brian Massumi, and many others. To what extent does the Web make for a virtual experience of cosmopolitanism? What are the social and ethical problems of this virtual immediacy? To what extent does the internet inflame national and even global conflict? Project Organizers
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ISSN 1938-1700
© World Picture 2009