CFP: Media Fields Conference UCSB: Display

The UCSB Media Fields Editorial Collective is excited to announce the call
for papers for:

Display | Excess and Visibility in Film, Media, and Culture

*M*edia Fields VII Conference | April 3-5, 2019

*University of California | *Santa Barbara


Keynote Speakers: Soraya Murray (Associate Professor in Film and Digital
Media at University of California Santa Cruz and principal faculty in Art
and Design Games and Playable Media), Joshua Neves (Assistant Professor
Film Cinema Studies at Concordia, Canada Research Chair, and Director of
the Global Emergent Media Lab).

Special Event: Screening of Shakedown (2018) and post-screening discussion
with Director Leilah Weinraub and Professor of Feminist Studies Mireille
Miller-Young.

******

DNA ancestry reports. Neon billboards. Bodycam videos. Reality tv
competitions. GIS maps. Stock tickers. Real-time election coverage.
Televised court cases. Local drag shows. Protest live streams. 3D
ultrasounds. Reddit AMAs. Twitch feeds.

Our contemporary mediascape is ostensibly awash with outlets to visualize
and represent modern life. The discourse of an “always on” and seamlessly
connected global visual culture is built upon an excess of visibility and
accessibility, which hides as much as it reveals. From this vantage, early
theories of the modern spectacle are at once uncannily relevant and
seemingly outdated. From this vantage, the Media Fields Editorial
Collective at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Film & Media Studies is
seeking proposals for its upcoming biennial conference that address this
year’s theme — Display — through the lenses of excess and visibility.

Early theorists in film and media studies exploring visibility, sensation,
and excess centered the spectacle as an organizing object of study. As the
everyday is continually mediated through communication technologies and
entertainment experiences and intensified by postmodernity, digitization,
and globalization, we seek to consider how theories of the excessive
spectacular can be revised by considering the (in)visible display. Seeking
to explore the usefulness of display to interrogate contemporary media
cultures and revisit historical questions, we ask: What continuities,
disjunctions, and transformations exist between historical and contemporary
cultures of display? Does a mediascape saturated with visibility and excess
call for a reexamination of the spectacle? Does the excess of the spectacle
still resonate with contemporary media practices? And, what does moving
from spectacle to display open up in our thinking on these topics? How can
we better investigate what is on the surface, behind, underneath, and
beyond the display?

In interrogating this topic, we seek papers that explore media’s
relationship with display in its various forms: as media objects, industry
practices, social processes, and cultural artifacts. We invite a range of
works that explore the modes and means of visibility; strategies and
practices of image construction; relationships between the production and
promotion of display; encounters and engagements with display regimes;
intersections of aesthetics and the politics of display; forms of local,
national, regional, and global aspirations and belonging; and interactions
between multisensory spectacle and forms of subjectivity, resistance, and
imagination.

Papers may reflect on display as it relates to questions around the
following themes. We especially encourage submissions that work to decenter
dominant paradigmatic privileges.

   -

   Space: architecture and design; media mobility; built environments and
   urban spaces; extractive and environmental media; public, consumer, and
   leisure spaces; domestic and private spaces; questions of scale (global,
   regional, local, national, territorial); physical infrastructures and urban
   planning
   -

   Industry: trade shows and conventions; distribution and exhibition;
   audience construction and measurement; ownership structures and
   affiliations; labor dynamics; cultures of production; digital
   infrastructures (data collection, storage, and analytics; algorithms;
   moderation practices; walled gardens; geoblocking)
   -

   Representation: film, tv, game and transmedial representations; publics
   and counterpublics; protest, disruption, and direct action; surveillance
   and policing; digital identities; data visualizations; immersive
   technologies; simulation and virtual reality
   -

   Embodiment: performance; trauma and memory; haptic, aural, and other
   sensory experiences; disciplinary regimes; articulations and experiences of
   difference (race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, age); belonging and
   community
   -

   Objects: media devices; screens and surfaces; imaging technologies
   (geographic information displays [GIDs], medical, environmental, military);
   signage, billboards, and promotional materials; markers, sensors, and
   indicators; attractions and amusements
   -

   Use: digital interfaces; platforms; mapping and navigation; connected
   viewing; online gaming; social media; digital consumer and retail
   practices; remix, copyleft, and piracy cultures; digital and streaming
   communities (YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, 4chan)

Panelists will have 15-20 minutes to present their papers. Please email a
250- to 300-word proposal and a brief bio (in PDF format) to
[email protected] by January 15, 2019. For any inquiries,
please contact the conference organizers: Aleah Kiley ([email protected]),
Charlotte Orzel ([email protected]), Nicole Strobel ([email protected]),
and Xiuhe Zhang ([email protected]).

-- 
Aleah Kiley, PhD Candidate
Film and Media Studies
UC Santa Barbara

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