Call For Work: OPEN SPACE/SINGAPORE/SOUTHEAST ASIA

OPEN SPACE/SINGAPORE/SOUTHEAST ASIA

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

We seek submissions for a curated online and on-site exhibition exploring the theme of Open Space. This exhibition will be showcased at the International Communication Association (ICA) Conference in Singapore from June 22-26, 2010. Open Space is mounted as the digital arts exploration of the conference theme Im/Material.

WHAT IS OPEN SPACE?

Open Space imagines a zone of horizontality mobilizing collaboration, participation, complex interactive dialogues, process, permeability, and community. The term open space originates in landscape design, where space is privileged over mass to stage meaningful and often surprising encounters and interactions. It has also emerged as a key environmental concept in the greening of global cities, in architecture, and in international organizational design. Indeterminancy, flexibility, and contingency constitute key strategies in open space. Open Space proposes a relational mode rather than a fixed object. Open Space suggests work that mobilizes an ethics of convenings and encounters in a sustainable zone. Open Space spurs collaborative knowledges and produces new provisional microterritories through engagement. Open Space is where technologies meet people meet spaces.

WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

We seek works and makers exploring the concepts and practice of Open Space in Singapore and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, and Indonesia). We are particularly interested in makers, artists, collectives, and collaborative projects from these regions. Works that are transnational and translational with a central concern of Southeast Asia as nexus will also be considered.

The Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia exhibition is looking for digital arts and design projects in any of the following forms/interfaces: online art projects, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), social gaming, creative robotics and digital devices, locative media, mobile applications, ambient screens, user-generated community narratives and maps, innovative digitally-based cartography projects, web-based archival projects, social media interfaces and projects, installation, live DJ/VJ remixes

Additionally, any other digital and analog forms that engage a collaborative aesthetic and participatory ethics are eligible for inclusion.

PRACTICAL DETAILS FOR PARTICIPATING PROJECTS

Deadline: March 3, 2010

To submit work: Please send a short, one paragraph description of your project, a short bio, and a link to your project or documentation of your project in an email inquiry to Patricia Zimmermann, Shaw Foundation Professor, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, at tpatricia@ntu.edu.sg no later than March 3, 2010

Exhibition: Projects will be featured on the ICA/WKWSCI website as the Open Space Exhibition. A limited number of artists/makers/collaborative teams will be selected from the overall exhibition to present at sessions and venues at ICA in Singapore June 22-26, with airfare and accommodation provided.

CURATORIAL TEAM

Patricia R. Zimmerman, Nikki Draper, Sharon Lin Tay, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Wenjie Zhang, Singapore, with curatorial associate Jenna Ng, Sweden.

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION

The International Communications Association (ICA) (http://www.ica2010.sg) is the largest international academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application aspects of human and mediated communication. ICA has over 4,500 members from 76 countries. Over 2,000 scholars, writers, and communications practitioners from around the world attend the conference. ICA 2010 is the first time in seven years that the annual conference will be held in Asia.

ICA 2010 CONFERENCE THEME: IM/MATERIAL

Communication is in many respects im/material because it constitutes the very nexus where the material and immaterial dimensions of our world meet each other. Communication is indeed spectral or ghostal because our interactions consist of making present what could have remained absent from a debate, a discussion, a conversation and so on. (from the conference website: http://www.ica2010.sg/conference.html)

WEE KIM WEE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION

The host for ICA 2010 is the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI)(http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/sci), at Nanyang Technological University (NTU)in Singapore. Ranked as one of the world’s top 100 universities, NTU(http://www.ntu.edu.sg) is a research-intensive university with globally acknowledged strengths in science and engineering. WKWSCI is one of the premiere institutions for research and teaching in communication and information in Asia. It houses the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre , the Asian Communication Resource Centre, and the Singapore Internet Research Centre.

CFP: Toward a Social Cinema: The Left Bank Group & the Political Documentary

Visible Evidence Panel Proposal for 2010:

This panel explores the phenomenon Richard Roud famously called the “Left Bank Cinema” in documentaries by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Georges Franju, Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin and lesser-known contemporaries Eli Lotar and Nicole Védrès. In addition, we will trace antecedents as far back as Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice, Vigo’s 1930 manifesto, “Towards a Social Cinema,” and interwar films by Joris Ivens and Henri Storck. While Vigo was canonized by the directors and critics associated with the Nouvelle Vague such François Truffaut and André Bazin, this adulation remained more a cult of personality than a rigorous engagement with Vigo’s ideas. Fortunately, his commitment to social issues was taken up by the Left Bank group, who had broader cultural ambitions than the Cahiers group. Rather than concentrating on cinephilia and auteurs, the members of the Left Bank group engaged social and political issues with a humanist sensibility and personal points of view. This panel seeks to explore this engagement between 1945 and 1967, especially as it addresses the aftermath of World War II, decolonization, global societies in transition, and the Viet-Nam war. Through this line of interrogation, we hope to account critically for the origins, development, and efficacy of a social cinema within an international context.


Chair Biographies:

Steven Ungar, Professor of French & Comparative Literature at The University of Iowa, is the author of books on Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. His recent work in film includes Popular Front Paris & the Poetics of Cultures (Harvard, 2005, co-authored with Dudley Andrew), Cléo de 5 à 7 (BFI, 2008), and an article on Jean Vigo’s notion of social cinema. His current project is Making Waves, a book-length study of early postwar French documentary (circa 1945-1967) linked to and around Left Bank filmmakers.

Ryan Watson is a Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies at The University of Iowa. His writing on documentary films and videos has appeared in the Journal of Film and Video and Afterimage. He has presented his work on documentary films and videos at Visible Evidence, the British Association of American Studies and the US Cultural Studies Association.

Please send proposals to Steve Ungar (steven-ungar@uiowa.edu) or Ryan Watson (ryan-watson@uiowa.edu) by MARCH 12th.

South Atlantic Modern Language Association: Flannery O'Connor in Film

This panel affiliated with the Flannery O'Connor Society welcomes papers that explore the SAMLA 2010 special focus "The Interplay of Text and Image" in O'Connor and film. While papers dealing with film adaptations of O'Connor's works will be considered, the session's specific goal is to expand our understanding of how filmmakers have incorporated and/or have contrasted O'Connor's themes, character types, etc. in their own works. Preference will be given to papers that seek creative connections between O'Connor's works and films that are not obvious adaptations of O'Connor's fiction.

Please e-mail abstracts (500 words) to Amy K. King at
akking@olemiss.edu before Friday, 26 March 2010.