Tag: Film-Television

Audiovisualtopia: A Conference on the Contemporary Screen Scene
Hosted by Saint Louis University – Madrid, Spain

CALL for PAPERS: One hundred twenty years after the Lumiere Brothers’ Arrival of a Trainat Ciotat Station / L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat and about 60 years after the insinuation of television into living rooms across the industrialized world, contemporary societies are saturated with audiovisual culture. More recently, the rise of widely affordable techno-substrates for production (digital photography) and exhibition (youtube, proliferating film festivals) are clearly enabling toward the “democratization” of audiovisual sophistication, such that the committed college sophomore can readily produce polished short films. In other words, there is much to celebrate!

In this milieu, one may also ask whether “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – or whether we are imbibing from the proverbial “old wine in new bottles”. That is, even as more audiovisual material is now produced in more places with more participants, film and TV (as industries, as texts) continue to be contested on the terrain of whether they largely challenge or affirm the prevailing status quo. The conference seeks to assess where we are now in a world awash with moving/narrativized images in which everyone (“everyone”) participates as producer and audience. Beyond the celebratory impulses, where are the continuities and discontinuities with the past as concern production and reception of audiovisual materials? What transformative politics are enabled, suppressed, or ambiguated in the current environment vis-à-vis film, TV and new media? The conference (re)considers where the pillars of screen studies (production, promotion, genre, stardom, auteurs, identity) are now situated for the ostensible disruptions of the contemporary milieu.

Specific areas of interest to the conference:
-Identity and Film/TV
-New Technological Substrates (for Production/Distribution/Reception)
-Festival & Award Culture
-World/Nation/Region on Screen
-Documenting Reality
-Short Films
-Co-production
-Screen Pedagogy
-Political Economy of Film & TV
-Genre Benders
-Auteurism
-Stardom
-Promotion of Audiovisual Material
-Fans

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Núria Triana Toribio, University of Kent, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT SPECIFICATIONS: 150-250 words. Include (A) Name(s) & Affiliations of Authors(s) and (B) 5 Keywords
CONFERENCE EMAIL ADDRESS: screen_studies@yahoo.com
DUE DATE for ABSTRACTS: Saturday 27 June 2015

STEERING COMMITTEE: The committee empanelled to judge the “Audiovisualtopia” conference abstracts consists of the following members: Christopher A. Chávez (University of Oregon at Eugene, USA); Brian Michael Goss (Saint Louis University-Madrid Campus, Spain); Mary Rachel Gould (Saint Louis University, USA); Pamela Rolfe (Saint Louis University-Madrid Campus, Spain); Arne Saeys (University of Antwerp, Belgium)