5th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference “Interruptions” Toronto, Canada May 8-9, 2020
Tamas Nagypal <[email protected]> Mon, 16 Dec 2019 13:26:04 -0500
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*5th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference Interruptions Toronto,
Canada May 8-9, 2020*
**
In a recent essay examining the imperial legacy of the camera, Teju Cole
writes of the camera as a weapon: When we speak of shooting with a
camera, we are acknowledging the kinship of photography and violence.
Three decades earlier, Toni Morrison asserted in her Nobel Lecture:
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence;
does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Both propositions share the same ideas, yet they demand further
examination. Coles comment on the relationship between photography and
violence was made by a practitioner of photography. Morrisons
observation on the relationship between language and violence was
brought to our attention by a novelist. In each case, the writer
focusses on the material /and/ social issues intrinsic to the use of a
specific medium of expression. Refusing to look past the material and
social conditions of expression, these two interventions allow us to
imagine and to explore new, subversive paths of creation and criticism.
It not a coincidence that Coles first essay on photography is entirely
informed by the concept of the blind spot. And it is not a coincidence
that Morrisons speech, too, invokes a conjunction of blindness and
knowledge: Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise. In
each case, the creation of images and thoughts stems from a joyous
failure to comply and an imaginative refusal to go along. The work of
art conjured in this process is one of generative interruption. In his
study of the black radical tradition in poetry and music, /In the
Break/, furthermore, Fred Moten has written of the interruptive power of
such a poetics: The history of blackness is testament to the fact that
objects can and do resist. Blackness the extended movement of a
specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that /anarranges/ every line
is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of
personhood and subjectivity. Motens notion of anarrangment speaks
here to the simultaneously disruptive and productive potential of paying
attention to the social and material conditions of aesthetic forms and
the radical potentiality inside aesthetic responses to such conditions.
Both film and philosophy have participated and still participate in
sustaining systemic oppression. This has taken both overt and covert
forms of violence and exclusion each perpetuating the policing of what
counts as compelling questions to ask, what forms of knowledge matter,
who is heard and seen, and under what conditions and where a subject can
appear. And yet, if film has the ability to do philosophy, to question
itself and its limitations and possibilities, and to pose new problems
for philosophy, then perhaps film also has the potential to challenge
its own imperial and oppressive habits and conditions as well. In a
hegemonic context, the interruption of dominant ways of thinking and
showing allows for alternative modes of knowledge and imagination,
subjectivity and being, to emerge. Christina Sharpe, in her recent study
/In the Wake/, makes a compelling case for what she calls the analytic
of wake work, a theory and a praxis that turns on the imaginations
ability to /imagine otherwise/ with and against rupture. Alongside
Coles and Morrisons important points, in Motens and Sharpes work we
discern a certain interruptive gesture that refuses the /work/ of
normative canons and formations of knowledge, an aesthetics and politics
of interruption that can both expose the ideological underpinnings and
assumptions of institutional conjunctions like film and philosophy and
contribute to new possibilities and spaces for (re)arranging
subjectivities, communities, and the very legacies and practices of such
institutions themselves.
For its 5th edition, the Spiral Film and Philosophy conference wants to
bring the /potential/ of interruption to the forefront. It proposes to
do so at the confluence of three areas: the epistemological, the
political, and the aesthetic. What happens to ideas and forms when the
imagination stumbles? What kinds of resistance emerge when traditional
representation breaks down? Which modes of belonging do we share when
the spectacle is suddenly interrupted? What happens when the dynamics of
domination in aesthetic, formal, durational, spatial, psychological,
historical, etc. terms are rendered inoperative? In the spirit of
these questions, we challenge all participants to go above and beyond
the common idea according to which it is easier to imagine an end to
the world than an end to capitalism. We contend that cinema and moving
images have value, even and especially when they do not work as
intended, as programmed, or as expected; when they fail, stutter or
stammer; when they confuse their objects, miss their targets, or
(suddenly or gradually) fall apart. As such, this call for papers is
open to but also extends beyond the experience of cinematic rupture.
Spiral welcomes contributions for 20-minute presentations from scholars,
artists and practitioners whose work pertains to topics and themes of
interruptive and inoperative cinema, but also (and not limited to):
* Postcolonial cinema
* Towards a destituent cinema
* Sabotaging the imperial gaze
* Camera obscura and ideology
* Militant cinema and activist cinema
* Evasive cinema and mass surveillance
* Images moving beyond the Western canon
* Decommodification and the movie industry
* Visibility and invisibility: filming the blind spot
* Anarchaeological practices and the audio-visual
* Pictures resisting productivity in neoliberal regimes
* Indigeneity and visual culture in Canada and elsewhere
* The subversive value of catastrophic failures in visual media
* Reclaiming speculative vision in the age of the Anthropocene
* Anarranging film grammars and representational economies
* Failure in algorithmic cinemas and the value of digital artifacts
* Breaking the status quo regarding representations of climate crisis
* The virtues of failure in cinematic experimentation and in visual art
* Queer and trans approaches to cinema aesthetics, history and politics
* Afrofuturism and indigenous futurism and the reframing of
science-fiction
* Alternative imaginaries and histories of cinema as reconfigured
through radical politics
The confirmed Keynote Speaker is Elizabeth Reich, Assistant Professor,
Film & Media Studies, in the Department of English at the University of
Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the intersections of Black Studies,
digital media, Afrofuturism, and social movements in historical, global,
and transnational contexts. She is author of Militant Visions: Black
Soldiers, /Internationalism and the Transformation of American Cinema/
(Rutgers, 2016) and her coedited collection, Justice in Time: Critical
Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom, is under contract at
University of Minnesota Press. She is also coeditor of New Approaches
to Cinematic Identification, a special issue of /Film Criticism/. Her
next monograph is on time and reparation, and recent essays have
appeared in /ASAP Journal/, /Film Criticism/, /Screen/, /Post45/,
/ASAP/J/, /World Records Journal/, and /African American Review/. She is
also a contributing editor to /ASAP/J/ and serves on the editorial board
of /Film Criticism/.
The 5th Spiral conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, on Friday,
May 8 and Saturday, May 9, 2020.
Please send a 350-word abstract, bibliography (5 references max.), 5
keywords, and biography (with institutional affiliation, if applicable)
in ONE DOCUMENT and as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT to
*[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>*
by Feb. 15, 2020. Notifications about acceptance or rejection of
proposal will be sent promptly.
Conference Registration Fee
* Conference Attendance: $100 (Canadian)
* Graduate Students and Underemployed: $50 (Canadian)
Conference website: *spiralfilmphilosophy.ca
<http://spiralfilmphilosophy.ca>*
Facebook: *@spiralfilmphilosophy*
Organized by the Spiral Collective in collaboration with the Department
of Cinema and Media Studies, York University.
=====
General list info and FAQ: http://comm.umn.edu/~grodman/cultstud.html
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<div><b><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">5th Spiral
Film and Philosophy Conference Interruptions Toronto,
Canada May 8-9, 2020</span></font></b></div>
<b>
</b>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><br class="">
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">In a recent
essay examining the imperial legacy of the camera, Teju Cole
writes of the camera as a weapon: When we speak of
shooting with a camera, we are acknowledging the kinship
of photography and violence. Three decades earlier, Toni
Morrison asserted in her Nobel Lecture: Oppressive language
does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more
than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits
knowledge. Both propositions share the same ideas, yet they
demand further examination. Coles comment on the
relationship between photography and violence was made by a
practitioner of photography. Morrisons observation on the
relationship between language and violence was brought to
our attention by a novelist. In each case, the writer
focusses on the material
<i class="">and</i> social issues intrinsic to the use of a
specific medium of expression. Refusing to look past the
material and social conditions of expression, these two
interventions allow us to imagine and to explore new,
subversive paths of creation and criticism. It not a
coincidence that Coles first essay on photography is
entirely informed by the concept of the blind spot. And it
is not a coincidence that Morrisons speech, too, invokes a
conjunction of blindness and knowledge: Once upon a time
there was an old woman. Blind. Wise. In each case, the
creation of images and thoughts stems from a joyous failure
to comply and an imaginative refusal to go along. The work
of art conjured in this process is one of generative
interruption. In his study of the black radical tradition in
poetry and music, <i class="">In the Break</i>,
furthermore, Fred Moten has written of the interruptive
power of such a poetics: The history of blackness is
testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.
Blackness the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an
ongoing irruption that <i class="">anarranges</i> every
line is a strain that pressures the assumption of the
equivalence of personhood and subjectivity. Motens notion
of anarrangment speaks here to the simultaneously
disruptive and productive potential of paying attention to
the social and material conditions of aesthetic forms and
the radical potentiality inside aesthetic responses to such
conditions. Both film and philosophy have participated and
still participate in sustaining systemic oppression. This
has taken both overt and covert forms of violence and
exclusion each perpetuating the policing of what counts as
compelling questions to ask, what forms of knowledge matter,
who is heard and seen, and under what conditions and where a
subject can appear. And yet, if film has the ability to do
philosophy, to question itself and its limitations and
possibilities, and to pose new problems for philosophy, then
perhaps film also has the potential to challenge its own
imperial and oppressive habits and conditions as well. In a
hegemonic context, the interruption of dominant ways of
thinking and showing allows for alternative modes of
knowledge and imagination, subjectivity and being, to
emerge. Christina Sharpe, in her recent study
<i class="">In the Wake</i>, makes a compelling case for
what she calls the analytic of wake work, a theory and a
praxis that turns on the imaginations ability to
<i class="">imagine otherwise</i> with and against rupture.
Alongside Coles and Morrisons important points, in Motens
and Sharpes work we discern a certain interruptive gesture
that refuses the
<i class="">work</i> of normative canons and formations of
knowledge, an aesthetics and politics of interruption that
can both expose the ideological underpinnings and
assumptions of institutional conjunctions like film and
philosophy and contribute to new possibilities and spaces
for (re)arranging subjectivities, communities, and the very
legacies and practices of such institutions themselves.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><br class="">
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">For its 5th
edition, the Spiral Film and Philosophy conference wants to
bring the
<i class="">potential</i> of interruption to the forefront.
It proposes to do so at the confluence of three areas: the
epistemological, the political, and the aesthetic. What
happens to ideas and forms when the imagination stumbles?
What kinds of resistance emerge when traditional
representation breaks down? Which modes of belonging do we
share when the spectacle is suddenly interrupted? What
happens when the dynamics of domination in aesthetic,
formal, durational, spatial, psychological, historical, etc.
terms are rendered inoperative? In the spirit of these
questions, we challenge all participants to go above and
beyond the common idea according to which it is easier to
imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. We
contend that cinema and moving images have value, even and
especially when they do not work as intended, as programmed,
or as expected; when they fail, stutter or stammer; when
they confuse their objects, miss their targets, or (suddenly
or gradually) fall apart. As such, this call for papers is
open to but also extends beyond the experience of cinematic
rupture. Spiral welcomes contributions for 20-minute
presentations from scholars, artists and practitioners whose
work pertains to topics and themes of interruptive and
inoperative cinema, but also (and not limited to):</span></font></div>
<div>
<ul class="">
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Postcolonial
cinema</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Towards a
destituent cinema</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Sabotaging the
imperial gaze</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Camera obscura
and ideology</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Militant cinema
and activist cinema</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Evasive cinema
and mass surveillance</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Images moving
beyond the Western canon</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Decommodification
and the movie industry</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Visibility and
invisibility: filming the blind spot </span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Anarchaeological
practices and the audio-visual</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Pictures
resisting productivity in neoliberal regimes</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Indigeneity and
visual culture in Canada and elsewhere</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">The subversive
value of catastrophic failures in visual media</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Reclaiming
speculative vision in the age of the Anthropocene</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Anarranging
film grammars and representational economies</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Failure in
algorithmic cinemas and the value of digital artifacts</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Breaking the
status quo regarding representations of climate crisis</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">The virtues of
failure in cinematic experimentation and in visual art</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Queer and trans
approaches to cinema aesthetics, history and politics</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Afrofuturism and
indigenous futurism and the reframing of science-fiction</span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Alternative
imaginaries and histories of cinema as reconfigured
through radical politics</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">The confirmed
Keynote Speaker is Elizabeth Reich, Assistant Professor,
Film & Media Studies, in the Department of English at
the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the
intersections of Black Studies, digital media, Afrofuturism,
and social movements in historical, global, and
transnational contexts. She is author of Militant Visions:
Black Soldiers,
<i class="">Internationalism and the Transformation of
American Cinema</i> (Rutgers, 2016) and her coedited
collection, Justice in Time: Critical Afrofuturism and the
Struggle for Black Freedom, is under contract at University
of Minnesota Press. She is also coeditor of New Approaches
to Cinematic Identification, a special issue of <i
class="">
Film Criticism</i>. Her next monograph is on time and
reparation, and recent essays have appeared in
<i class="">ASAP Journal</i>, <i class="">Film Criticism</i>,
<i class="">Screen</i>,
<i class="">Post45</i>, <i class="">ASAP/J</i>, <i
class="">World Records Journal</i>, and
<i class="">African American Review</i>. She is also a
contributing editor to <i class="">
ASAP/J</i> and serves on the editorial board of <i
class="">Film Criticism</i>.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><br class="">
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">The 5th Spiral
conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, on Friday, May 8
and Saturday, May 9, 2020.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><br class="">
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">Please send a
350-word abstract, bibliography (5 references max.), 5
keywords, and biography (with institutional affiliation, if
applicable) in ONE DOCUMENT and as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT to <b
class=""><a href="mailto:[email protected]"
class="">[email protected]</a></b> by Feb.
15, 2020. Notifications about acceptance or rejection of
proposal will be sent promptly.</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><br class="">
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">Conference
Registration Fee</span></font></div>
<div>
<ul class="">
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Conference
Attendance: $100 (Canadian) </span></li>
<li class=""><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: large;" class="">Graduate
Students and Underemployed: $50 (Canadian)</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">Conference
website:
<b class=""><a href="http://spiralfilmphilosophy.ca"
class="">spiralfilmphilosophy.ca</a></b> </span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">Facebook:
<b class="">@spiralfilmphilosophy</b></span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class=""><br class="">
</span></font></div>
<div><font class="" size="4" color="#000000"><span
style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">Organized by the
Spiral Collective in collaboration with the Department of
Cinema and Media Studies, York University.</span></font></div>
</div>
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