OPEN CALL
Our CFP is now closed. Thanks to all the participants!
Applications will now move to the next stages of assessment and we'll get in touch with each of you and announce the results in July.
IMAGE, ARCHIVE AND CONFLICT
(IM)MATERIAL ECOLOGIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE
The Archivo Platform and the Archivo Papers Journal, are pleased to announce the 4th edition of Reframing the Archive – International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture.
KEYNOTE & GUEST SPEAKERS
PROF. ANNA MARÍA GUASCH University of Barcelona | DR. SARA CALLAHAN Stockholm University, Sweden |
EMERIC LHUISSET Visual Artist | PEDRO LAGOA Visual Artist |
The conference will address the theme Image, Archive and Conflict and aims to critically investigate the relationship between images, the archive and conflict across past and present, long duration and real time, and the impact of digital media on the status and development of technical images as well as its consequences in historical conscience, present and future imaginaries. Focusing on the production, circulation, and archiving of images, this conference will address two main perspectives: on the one hand, it aims to explore the materialities and immaterialities of archival production within the digital age in regard to contemporary critical appropriations through visual arts that address, assess and contest past and present conflicts, history’s repressed events and violations. On the other hand, it intends to examine the techno-aesthetics of datafication, understanding artistic strategies as potential sites for resisting and counter-acting current extractivist processes, which tend to capture and transform everyday life into data.
The emergence of digital cameras in the 1980’s raised a widespread concern about the loss of photography’s evidential value, causing a generalised anxiety about a possible ‘death of photography’, and thus shaking our understanding of documentary and the representation of reality. The digital turn not only brought considerable changes to the photographic medium, from ontological standpoints and new reflections on photography and its indexical value, but also on an operative context, regarding photography’s new ways of production, circulation and storage. The digital era and its transition from photography to ‘data’ raised heated debates about new archival production, the details preserved and lost, and the future and durability of digital databases, to name just a few. Attempting to safely preserve the documentation of material culture propelled the digitisation of institutional archives and collections, but also the preservation of vernacular imagery otherwise condemned to oblivion. Furthermore, with the advent of ‘post-photography’, the canon of the museum was shaken by new forms of representation, putting forward new ways of managing, curating, and exhibiting archives and collections. Within contemporary visual arts, strategies of archival appropriation both challenge and potentiate new archival technologies, while reassessing historical conscience and performing counter practices that bring to light the once excluded (hi)stories.
Digital technologies have expanded the boundaries of the archive, which has become a more liquid territory, with constant fluctuations of information that is accumulated, scrutinised, selected and processed in real time. In this context, it is urgent to acknowledge the biases, limitations and paradoxes involved in the processes of capture, classification, owning and accessing data. The constant flow of data through submarine wires provides a global frame in which processes linked to offensive and extractivist apparatus are deployed. A renewed Cold War has emerged, which is not only warfare, but numerical information. Ownership and use of these archival technologies will determine the geopolitical balance of the century, probably even more than the use of missiles and weapons. In the same way, colonialism doesn’t stop with the exchange of commodities or goods, nor with the subordination of cultures and civilisations, following the modern/colonial world-system hierarchised since the 15th Century. On the contrary, colonialism is deployed through the upgrowing financialization of economies, commercial flow of people and migrant ideas, and the datafication of everyday life.
The 4th edition of the International Conference Reframing the Archive invites scholars at any stage of their careers, as well as visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts to reflect on photography, film and other lens-based media, its production, circulation and transformations within the digitally mediatized cultures of the 21st Century. We welcome proposals for 15-minute theory and practice-led presentations (followed by 15-minute panel discussion) from various disciplines, including: photography, cinema and new media, art history and theory, anthropology, museology, philosophy, cultural studies, visual and media studies, and fine and graphic arts. These should present an in-depth investigation on the relationship between photography, the archive and conflict. Please note that the conference will be in English.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
1. THE (IM)MATERIALITIES OF VISUAL ARCHIVES
The digital shift: ontological and epistemological conflicts
Critical history of the digital turn in visual culture
The ethics and politics of new archival technologies
Archival digitisation, access, mediation and circulation of documents
The digital archive: discoveries, challenges and potentials in humanities and arts
Photography and the database: new taxonomies and metadata
Documentary, fiction and re-enactment: potential strategies to address conflict
Representing conflict: from photography’s indexical value to its material traces
New histories and counter histories through the digital archive
Artistic appropriation of archival images as practices of remediation
From digital immateriality to new material forms created through visual arts
Digital archives and new Nation-building processes
Borderless: images and documents relational database at the service of a contemporary transnational historiography
Digital archives and visual studies: Theoretical implications
Performance and Happening: the preservation of contemporary art in the digital archive
2. ARCHIVES AND THE TECHNO-AESTHETICS OF DATAFICATION
Thinking archival topology and nomology in the digital age
Big data and critical positions of feminism, decolonial theories, ecosocial consciousness and care
Datafication of everyday life turned into tools of conflict and warfare
Impact of Big Data on current humanitarian, sociopolitical, war, climate, and cultural crisis
Visual arts as counter-practice to current extractivist processes of the digital era
Temporalities and economies of attention in the digital era
Post-photography, digital arts, and new media aesthetics
Aesthetics of computation arts
Digital humanities, new methodologies and practices
Art and Cognitive techno-ecologies
Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, and the database
Translating contemporary historiography from documental to digital sources: limits and advantages
Archives of the World: forms, uses and potentialities of photographic databases
Beyond conflicts: Global systems of cataloguing digital texts and images
The structure of the archive as a model of contemporary art
Imaginaries of future: digital archives and speculative practices
SUBMITTING YOUR PROPOSAL OUR CFP IS NOW CLOSED
Proposal for the RTA 2023 should be submitted in English, according to two possible formats: individual papers; or pre-constituted panels. Candidates should submit one proposal only.
:: Guidelines for individual papers submission
Individual presentations have a duration of 15 minutes.
Candidates are asked to submit a proposal that includes:
— author info (name, email, affiliation, ORCID)
— paper title, abstract (250 words), and keywords (max. 5),
— bibliographical references (max. 5),
— author short biographical note (written in third person, 100 words).
:: Guidelines for pre-constituted panels submission
Submission of proposals for pre-constituted panels should include 3 papers presentations.
Panel organiser(s) are asked to submit a panel proposal that includes:
— panel title and abstract (250 words)
— information regarding the 3 speakers and individual papers, as described above in the guidelines for individual papers.
SELECTION PROCESS
Submitted proposals will go through a process of blind peer-reviewing, and authors will be notified of the results of their proposals by the end of July, 2023.
PUBLICATION
We are considering the possibility of publishing the contributions presented at the conference.
Selected speakers will be considered to participate in an edited volume of the scholarly open-access publication Archivo Papers Journal, to be published in 2024.
IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for submission: June 15, 2023 Notification of selected speakers: July, 2023 Deadline for speakers registration: one week after confirmation of acceptance
Conference: September 22-23, 2023
CONFERENCE FEES
Submission of proposals for the conference is free.
Registration of conference speakers:
Archivo Platform members – FREE
Non-members - €35
Registration of participants:
Archivo Platform members – FREE
Non-members - €5 each day
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For more information on membership subscription, click here.
QUERIES
Should you have any queries, please contact us at info@reframingthearchive.com
Organising Committee: Ana Catarina Pinho [Convenor], IHA-FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Marta Labad [co-convenor], UTAD, Spain
Scientific Committee: Annalisa Laganà, Università della Calabria, Italy
Arola Valls, University of Barcelona, Spain
Laura Singeot, Reims University, France
Marianna Tsionki, Leeds Arts University, United Kingdom
Pablo Santa Olalla, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Tomás Zarza, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
