SCREEN-L Archives

December 2008, Week 5

SCREEN-L@LISTSERV.UA.EDU

Options: Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Athena Tan <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 29 Dec 2008 09:35:51 -0800
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (93 lines)
Media Fields 2: INFRASTRUCTURES

A conference hosted by graduate students in the Department of Film and
Media Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara
April 9-10, 2009


Keynote Speaker: Brian Larkin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,
Columbia University


The 2007 Media Fields conference gathered students and scholars to
reflect upon how their projects related to the idea of the field in
the epistemological and environmental registers of the term. In April
2009, a second Media Fields conference will hone in on the more
specific idea of infrastructures. If a field is an expanse of space,
infrastructures are skeletal and map out interactions, relations, and
orders of elements in such a space.


The OED defines infrastructure as "a collective term for the
subordinate parts of an undertaking; substructure, foundation; spec.
the permanent installations forming a basis for military operations,
as airfields, naval bases, training establishments, etc." With the
proliferation of media objects in everyday spaces, media increasingly
shape, are shaped by, and form parts of infrastructures.  Recent work
on media by scholars such as Brian Larkin, Lisa Parks, Jonathan
Sterne, and Zhang Zhen points to the import of infrastructures in
relation to the study of material spaces, representations, and
practices related to filmgoing, piracy, satellite footprints,
globalization, and urbanization. Media Fields: Infrastructures aims to
build upon such work and to consider how the term infrastructure
offers a rubric in which to extend the conceptual radius of film and
media studies in different directions. How might perspectives from the
humanities inform thought about media and infrastructures? And how
might media and cultural studies benefit from perspectives generated
in social sciences and environmental design?


You might consider the following types of projects and ideas:

--Opening up the metaphoricity of infrastructures. How might media
studies be able to appropriate concepts, languages, and practices
related to infrastructures? What are infrastructures of media
(scripts? shots?), what infrastructures of language do we use to
understand media, and how might these questions lead to new
disciplinary trajectories?

--Media as they serve as infrastructures of the nation (national
monuments, icons, and media spectacles), of global transitions (call
centers, satellite footprints, media industries and regulations), of
developmental paradigms (the IMF, World Expos) of the body (medical
imagery, x-rays), of travel (in-flight entertainment, billboards), and
of security (emergency services, the Patriot Act).

--Examinations of the material infrastructures of media systems such
as wired and wireless networks, routers, DVD cases, archives, or movie
theaters, as well as infrastructures which support media practices.
For example, how might understanding the infrastructures of media
piracy entail considerations of databases, undersea cables, copyright,
code, and/or video stores? How are media infrastructures such as these
represented or visualized?

--In expanding the notion of infrastructure beyond material objects,
one can consider how social and cultural practices might function as
media infrastructure—think for example of film exhibitions, public art
demonstrations, as well as the role of less material infrastructures
(grammar, code). How might one study infrastructures of a text or a
website? How might one define an aesthetics of infrastructures?


The scope of this conference is interdisciplinary. We invite paper
submissions and project proposals (eg., films, models, installations)
from graduate students, scholars and practitioners.


**Please submit abstracts or project proposals of 300 words or less to
[log in to unmask] by January 30, 2009.**


--
Athena Tan
PhD Student
Department of Film and Media Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
[log in to unmask]

----
Learn to speak like a film/TV professor! Listen to the ScreenLex
podcast:
http://www.screenlex.org

ATOM RSS1 RSS2