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September 2010, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Jennifer Barker <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:30:50 -0400
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  CFP: RENDERING THE VISIBLE
The Program in Moving Image Studies
Department of Communication,
Georgia State University, Atlanta
February 11-12, 2011
Proposal deadline: September 15, 2010

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." Full CFP available at 
http://www.movingimagestudies.com/ for downloading, posting, and sharing.

Keynote speakers:
Akira Mizuta Lippit (University of Southern California)
Vivian Sobchack (University of California at Los Angeles)

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 
"luminence" (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 fixed. 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-cinematic (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) and brief biography by 15 
September 2010 to movingimagestudies at gmail dot com. Queries can be 
directed to conference organizers Angelo Restivo, Alessandra Raengo, or 
Jennifer M. Barker (see http://www.movingimagestudies.com for e-mail 
addresses).


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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org

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