Call for Proposals: (Re)Imagining AI Interventions///Intervening (into) AI Imaginaries

https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/cfps

Deadline: 500-word abstract due January 15, 2024, papers due June 1, 2025

In an age of endless disruption, how do we live with the rapid advances and early analyses of artificial intelligence software, moral panic, and the voracious consumption of already oppressive datasets and social relations? We have already seen some deep scholarly engagement with issues of ethical database scraping and intellectual property violations (Crawford 2021; Delfanti & Phan 2024; Luka & Millette 2018), environmental impacts (Hogan & Lepage-Richer 2024; Valdivia 2023; MIT Technology Review Insights 2023; Torres 2024), and workflow interferences and augmentations (Ahmed et al 2024; Grohmann et al 2022; Khovanskaya et al 2022; Poell, Nieborg & Duffy 2022). How can we imagine and design critical and creative futures (Alcoff 2020; Nakayama & Morris 2015; Tozer et al 2023; Varon & Peña 2021) for artists, activists, scholars, and consumer-worker-citizens considering these latest AI developments? How do we resist (re)colonization impulses (Couture & Toupin 2019; Campbell & Forman 2023; Hampton 2023) in the AI context? Building on recent work (e.g., Chan et al., 2020; Cifor et al, 2019; Coleman 2023; Lewis 2024; Ricaurte Quijano 2021; Stinson & Vlaad 2024), how can we imagine rebuilding… revisualizing… repairing… refusing… the world(s) we live and work in? In this issue, we want to explore a range of critical framings and interventions that understand AI as the latest wave of technological change that may be able to help or hinder us in our weird and sometimes wonderful daily grind(s), rather than as a totalizing and inevitable replacement of human existence.

In this call, we seek accounts and theorizations of research and everyday projects that carry with them a critical analysis of or intervention into the enigmatic promises of AI imaginaries. But we aim to make a larger socio-cultural contribution. We seek to critically imagine and design insightful, sustainable and joyful futures in the context of ubiquitous digital demands and possibilities, including the recent explosion of AI in our work worlds and everyday lives.

This special issue will bring together submissions across arts, humanities, visual culture, and media fields of study as well as feminist STS, critical disability, knowledge media design, research-creation, world-building and futurisms studies. We aim to generate provocations, approaches, and examples that can address the renewed racialized, gendered, colonial, economic, and geopolitical power dynamics at play in the AI context.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

– The ways in which the notion of “self” slithers in the AI context, flowing and drifting between materiality and virtuality, including melding together AI capabilities with/around/about prosthetics, digital intimacy, and affect;

– Critiquing reactive and derivative predictive models and modes of futurisms and imagining ways of looking that incorporate but go beyond foresight, “for-see,” and socially just world-building opportunities;

– How we can create meaning-making with emerging technologies, reversing the notion that technological creators do not know how technology will be used by general publics and vice-versa;

– The ways that we are already experiencing AI apathy, as forms of technological fatigue, civic disengagement, or pedagogical frustration;

– How AI operates as the latest technological “disruptor” in a digital landscape littered with the debris of its predecessors. For example, how do early adopters and artists harvest the opportunities presented by AI as a society and disciplinary “disruptor” in social and commercialized ways?

– Why and how tension is amped up through conflicts generated by open or accessible “democratic” modes of creativity and inclusion and the commercialization impetus of “Creative Industries.” For example, how can the idea of “open AI” and the operations of “Open AI” (the company) be theorized together or separately;

– Analysing the specificity of impacts of Generative AI on creativity and visual cultures in/from the Global South, potentially extending into considerations of how industrial structures are being normalized in Global North (minority) forms, reshaped by AI and emergent digital technologies;

– The potential for AI to outright kill, or by some means rekindle (sub)cultural literacies, expressions, and formats (fanfiction, social media, video, audio, publishing);

– Curatorial critiques and valorizations of AI exhibitions and artistic work, including how some tools limit or support the creative explorations of marginal artists, artistic legacies and narratives;

– The effect of AI on creative labour, how systems of cultural production and distribution inevitably privilege capital over creative workers and consumer-worker-citizens, and how active resistance to such privilege can repair and revive these fields of production and distribution

Contributions may include: research articles or manifestos (4,000-6,000 words), video essays, multimedia research-creation pieces, and exhibition and book reviews (approx. 1,500 words).

Contributions may be in English or French. Email your 500 word abstract by January 15, 2025 and/or enquiries to:

Maryelizabeth.luka@utoronto.ca
Caroline.klimek@utoronto.ca
Aline.zara@mail.utoronto.ca

Guest Edited by Mary Elizabeth (ME) Luka, Caroline Klimek, and Aline Zara, University of Toronto.

Appel à contributions : (Ré)Imaginer les interventions en IA /// Intervenir dans les imaginaires de l’IA

https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/cfps

Date limite : résumé de 500 mots à soumettre avant le 15ème janvier 2025, articles à remettre pour le 1er juin 2025

À une époque de bouleversements incessants, comment cohabitons-nous avec les avancées fulgurantes de l’intelligence artificielle, les analyses préliminaires, la panique morale et la consommation vorace de bases de données déjà oppressives et des relations sociales qui les accompagnent ? Des chercheurs se sont déjà penchés sur des questions profondes telles que le raclage éthique des bases de données et les violations de la propriété intellectuelle (Crawford 2021; Delfanti & Phan 2024; Luka & Millette 2018), les impacts environnementaux (Hogan & Lepage-Richer 2024; Valdivia 2023; MIT Technology Review Insights 2023; Torres 2024), ainsi que les interférences et augmentations dans les flux de travail (Ahmed et al 2024; Grohmann et al 2022; Khovanskaya et al 2022; Poell, Nieborg & Duffy 2022). Comment pouvons-nous imaginer et concevoir des futurs critiques et créatifs (Alcoff 2020; Nakayama & Morris 2015; Tozer et al 2023; Varon & Peña 2021) pour les artistes, activistes, chercheurs et citoyens-consommateurs-travailleurs face à ces dernières évolutions de l’IA ? Comment résistons-nous aux impulsions de (re)colonisation (Couture & Toupin 2019; Campbell & Forman 2023; Hampton 2023) dans le contexte de l’IA ? En s’appuyant sur des travaux récents (par exemple, Chan et al., 2020; Cifor et al, 2019; Coleman 2023; Lewis 2024; Ricaurte Quijano 2021; Stinson & Vlaad 2024), comment pouvons- nous imaginer la reconstruction… la re-visualisation… la réparation… le refus… des mondes dans lesquels nous vivons et travaillons ? Dans ce numéro, nous souhaitons explorer une gamme d’encadrements critiques et d’interventions qui comprennent l’IA comme la dernière vague de changement technologique, capable de nous aider ou de nous gêner dans notre quotidien étrange et parfois merveilleux, plutôt que comme un remplacement totalisant et inévitable de l’existence humaine.

Dans cet appel, nous sollicitons des récits et des théorisations de projets de recherche et du quotidien qui portent une analyse critique ou une intervention sur les promesses énigmatiques des imaginaires de l’IA. Notre objectif est toutefois de faire une contribution socioculturelle plus large. Nous souhaitons imaginer et concevoir des futurs perspicaces, durables et joyeux dans le contexte des exigences et possibilités numériques omniprésentes, y compris l’explosion récente de l’IA dans nos mondes professionnels et quotidiens.

Ce numéro spécial réunira des contributions dans les domaines des arts, des sciences humaines, de la culture visuelle et des médias, ainsi que des études féministes en STS, des études critiques du handicap, de la conception des médias du savoir, de la recherche-création, de la construction de mondes et des études du futurisme. Nous visons à générer des provocations, des approches et des exemples qui peuvent aborder les dynamiques de pouvoir racialisées, genrées, coloniales, économiques et géopolitiques renouvelées à l’œuvre dans le contexte de l’IA.

Les sujets abordés peuvent inclure, mais ne sont pas limités à :

– Les manières dont la notion de “soi” se glisse dans le contexte de l’IA, entre matérialité et virtualité, incluant la fusion des capacités de l’IA avec/à propos des prothèses, de l’intimité numérique et de l’affect ;

– La critique des modèles prédictifs réactifs et dérivés, et l’imagination de modes de regard qui incorporent mais dépassent la prévoyance, la “pré-vision” et les opportunités de construction de mondes socialement justes ;

– La façon dont nous pouvons créer du sens avec les technologies émergentes, en inversant l’idée selon laquelle les créateurs technologiques ne savent pas comment la technologie sera utilisée par les publics et vice-versa ;

– Les manières dont nous éprouvons déjà une apathie à l’égard de l’IA, sous forme de fatigue technologique, de désengagement civique ou de frustration pédagogique ;

– La manière dont l’IA fonctionne comme le dernier “disrupteur” technologique dans un paysage numérique jonché des débris de ses prédécesseurs. Par exemple, comment les premiers utilisateurs et artistes exploitent-ils les opportunités présentées par l’IA en tant que “disrupteur” sociétal et disciplinaire, de manière sociale et commercialisée ?

– Pourquoi et comment les tensions sont amplifiées par les conflits générés par les modes créatifs “démocratiques” ouverts ou accessibles et l’impulsion de commercialisation des “industries créatives”. Par exemple, comment l’idée d’“open AI” et les opérations d’“Open AI” (l’entreprise) peuvent-elles être théorisées ensemble ou séparément ?

– Les analyses portant sur la spécificité des impacts de l’IA générative sur la créativité et les cultures visuelles dans/de la région du Sud Global, potentiellement en étendant les considérations sur la manière dont les structures industrielles sont normalisées dans les formes (minoritaires) du Nord Global, remodelées par l’IA et les technologies numériques émergentes ;

– Le potentiel de l’IA à anéantir ou, d’une manière ou d’une autre, raviver les littératies, expressions et formats (fanfiction, réseaux sociaux, vidéo, audio, édition) (sous-)culturels ;

– Les critiques curatoriales et les valorisations des expositions et travaux artistiques liés à l’IA, y compris la manière dont certains outils limitent ou soutiennent les explorations créatives des artistes marginalisés, des legs artistiques et des récits ;

– L’effet de l’IA sur le travail créatif, comment les systèmes de production et de distribution culturelle privilégient inévitablement le capital au détriment des travailleurs créatifs et des citoyens- consommateurs-travailleurs, et comment une résistance active à ce privilège peut réparer et raviver ces champs de production et de distribution.

Les contributions peuvent inclure : des articles de recherche ou des manifestes (4 000-6 000 mots), des essais vidéo, des pièces de recherche-création multimédia, et des critiques d’exposition et de livre (environ 1 500 mots). Les contributions peuvent être rédigées en anglais ou en français.

Envoyez votre résumé de 500 mots avant le 15ème janvier 2025 à :

Maryelizabeth.luka@utoronto.ca
Caroline.klimek@utoronto.ca
Aline.zara@mail.utoronto.ca

Numéro dirigé par Mary Elizabeth (ME) Luka, Caroline Klimek, et Aline Zara, Université de Toronto.

Works Cited/Bibliographie:

Ahmed, I., Mim, J., Nandi, D., Khan, S., Dey, A. (2024). Impacts of Text-to-Image Generative AI Tools on Digital Image-making Practices in the Global South. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641951

Alcoff, L. M. (2020). Lugones’s World-Making. Critical Philosophy of Race 8 (1-2), 199-211.

Campbell, M.V. & Forman, M. (2023). Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production. Intellect.

Chan, L., Hall, B., Piron, F., Tandon, R., & Williams, L. (2020). Open Science Beyond Open Access: For and with communities, A step towards the decolonization of knowledge. Ottawa, Canada: Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s IdeaLab

Cifor, M., Garcia, P., Cowan, T.L., Rault, J., Sutherland, T., Chan, A., Rode, J., Hoffmann, A.L., Salehi, N., Nakamura, L. (2019). Feminist Data Manifest-No. Retrieved from: https://www.manifestno.com/.

Coleman, B. (2023). Reality Was Whatever Happened : Octavia Butler AI and Other Possible Worlds. Berlin: K. Verlag.

Couture, S., & Toupin, S. (2019). What does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital? New Media & Society, 21(10), 2305-2322. https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1177/1461444819865984

Crawford, K. 2021. Atlas of AI. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Delfanti, A., & Phan, M. (2024). Rip It Up and Start Again: Creative Labor and the Industrialization of Remix. Television & New Media, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764241227613

Grohmann, R., Pereira, G., Guerra, A., Abilio, L. C., Moreschi, B., & Jurno, A. (2022). Platform scams: Brazilian workers’ experiences of dishonest and uncertain algorithmic management. New Media & Society, 24(7), 1611-1631. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099225

Hampton, L. M. (2023). ‘Techno-Racial Capitalism: A Decolonial Black Feminist Marxist Perspective’, in Jude Browne, and others (eds), Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines (Oxford, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Nov. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889898.003.0008.

Hogan, M., & Lepage-Richer, T. (2024). Extractive AI. Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy. https://www.mediatechdemocracy.com/climatetechhoganlepagericher.

Khovanskaya, V., Tandon, U., Arcilla, E., Hussein, M. H., Zschiesche, P., & Irani, L. (2022). Hostile Ecologies: Navigating the Barriers to Community-Led Innovation. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), 1-26.

Lewis, J. E. (2024). The future imaginary. In T. J. Taylor, I. Lavender III, G. L. Dillon, & B. Chattopadhyay (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of CoFuturisms. New York: Routledge.

Luka, M.E., & Millette, M. (2018). (Re)framing Big Data: Activating Situated Knowledges and a Feminist Ethics of Care in Social Media Research. Social Media + Society, 4(2).https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118768297

MIT Technology Review Insights. (2023). “Sustainability starts with the data center,” https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/MIT_Hitachi_FNL_111623.pdf?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=all_platforms&utm_campaign=insights_ebrief&utm_term=11.27.23&utm_content=insights.report.

Nakayama, T.K., & Morris, C.E., III. (2015). Worldmaking and Everyday Interventions. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2(1), v-viii. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/575372.

Poell, T., Nieborg, D. B., & Duffy, B. E. (2022). Platforms and cultural production. Cambridge: Polity.

Ricaurte Quijano, P. (2021). Reimagining AI. Feminist AI. https://feministai.pubpub.org/pub/reimagining-ai

Stinson, C., & Vlaad, S. (2024). A feeling for the algorithm: Diversity, expertise, and artificial intelligence. Big Data & Society, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231224247

Torres, E. P. (2024, June 24). AI doomers have warned of the tech-pocalypse – while doing their best to accelerate it. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2024/06/24/ai-doomers-have-warned-of-the-tech-pocalypse–while-doing-their-best-to-accelerate-it/

Tozer, L., Nagendra, H., Anderson, P. and Kavonic, J. (2023). Towards just nature-based solutions for cities. In Nature-Based Solutions for Cities, eds., T. McPhearson, N. Kabisch, & N. Frantzeskaki, pp. 29-47. Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800376762.00011.

Varon, J. & Peña, P. (2021). Building a Feminist toolkit to question A.I. systems. Why is A.I. a Feminist Issue? Retrieved from https://notmy.ai/news/algorithmic-emancipation-building-a-feminist-toolkit-to-question-a-i-systems/.

Version française ci-bas

2025 Annual Graduate Student Conference
Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto
Friday, March 14th to Sunday, March 16th, 2025

Call for Papers: EXIT SIGNS

EXIT SIGNS pose a provocative double signification. The icon signifies warning and, at the same time, evokes an imagined hidden space, a way forward, or a way out. In his 1983 essay “What is Enlightenment?,” Michel Foucault revives a question posed two centuries earlier by Immanuel Kant which attends to the political purchase of Exit (Ausgang) as a scene of decision. It is this moment of pause, which occurs before the act of choosing, which Kant originally marks as the kernel of the Enlightenment project. Indeed, beyond Foucault and Kant, the exit qua scene has been—and continues to be—seized upon by filmmakers and writers alike, who saw in this moment of transit the poignancy of the Exit Signs’ liminality. Exit Signs promise futures that are intangible and continually receding into a cascade of speculative impasses.

Cinema has long been fascinated with the Exit Sign. This rousing symbol manifests quite literally, as in the heart-pounding race towards an exit and promise of escape characteristic of the horror tradition, as well as more subtly, regarding film’s infatuation with doorways, passages, and porous architectures. In fact, one of the earliest films captures workers pouring out of a Lumière factory—a structured daily exodus constitutive of the labour practices of the Industrial Revolution. Extradiegetically, Exit Signs define the contemporaneous cinematic experience as well: the arresting red and green lights illuminated within physical theatres around the globe—the glowing anchor of reality contrasting the flashing, moving images that transport audiences. It is this Exit Sign which keeps us from complete diegetic immersion, complicating theories of spectatorial identification. When the lights come back on and audiences leave the theatre, to press on Roland Barthes’ provocations in “Leaving the Movie Theatre,” how do exits cut us out of the apparatus? Exits are themselves an integral visual backbone of the movies, while Exit Signs as a cinematic pillar can be further abstracted. In cinematic practice, spectatorship, and scholarship, Exit Signs open up new ways of thinking about presences, absences, histories, and futurities alike. This imaginative quality of cinema allows for a retracing of the past and speculation towards other, potential futures. At the same time, the Exit Sign may honour utopia’s image ban, signalling the very threshold of the knowable and thinkable, demarcating the scenes of decision that refuse to be deformed by the violence of speculation. Approached in this way, this opening up, this imaginative quality of cinema, is what the Exit Sign warns of, as it does little more than proffer reconciled histories and reassure with soothing images of desirable futures—as Adorno wrote, “as long as the world is as it is, all pictures of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the picture of death.” Instead, the Exit that calls for our attention here is the open mouth of the cinema demanding things be different, yet offering nothing beyond the impenetrable horizons of negation, the only “chance of another world that is not yet.”

The Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto’s 2025 Annual Graduate Conference seeks submissions that attempt to find ways out through “EXIT SIGNS.” In other words, this year’s conference, which is in collaboration with a simultaneous graduate conference, “SIGNS OF EXIT,” at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, is interested in papers that address the thematic triangulation of hope, nihilism, and utopia through moving images and visual cultures. While these topics appear, at first, to bristle against one other, such contradictions are generative in their abrasiveness, and exploring their convergences and affinities are important interventions in contemporary scholarly debate. How can we understand cinema’s unique relationship to speculation, worldbuilding, and visualised potentiality? How does desire and hope, even nihilism, play into filmic conceptions of exits, escapes, forms of leaving—and to where do these openings lead? Whether it be a philosophical approach, working with a specific media object, returning to the works of thinkers like Adorno and Kant, or a creative practice that shares in this generative bristling, this year’s joint conference is eager to engage with a wide range of conceptions of exits. Perhaps it is through finding a way out that we can find a way in.

Sample topics might include but are not limited to: accelerationism; Afropessimism; apocalyptic and postapocalyptic imaginaries; capitalist realism; continuities and discontinuities; cruel optimism; decline and decadence; desire, eroticism, and eros; escapist media; fugitivity, ungovernability, and lines of flight; futurities; hapticality, or being in the hold; hope and progress; lack and absence; migration and diaspora; narrative endings, closures, and resolutions; negation and the dialectic; nihilism; nostalgia; opacity, withdrawal, and disappearance; order and disorder; othering, difference, and alterity; postcolonial and decolonial theories; potentialities; queer futurity and the antisocial thesis; reform, revolution, and revolt; static vs. dynamic time; sustainability and durability; the event and its depictions; the restorative, transformative, and reparative; the thinkable and unthinkable; the undercommons; truth and reconciliation; utopia and dystopia.

Conference format: This conference takes place in a unique format as a collaboration with a simultaneous graduate conference, “SIGNS OF EXIT,” at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. You may apply to either “EXIT SIGNS” or “SIGNS OF EXIT,” but not both. In an effort to provoke an interdisciplinary inquiry into exit, certain thematic panels will include participants from both cinema studies and comparative literature. Presenters will have 15-20 minutes to share papers, followed by a moderated question period. The working languages will be English and French. Submission details: We welcome English and French submissions from independent scholars and graduate students worldwide. Please submit a brief abstract (300-500 words) and a short bio of 50-100 words to csgraduatestudentunion@gmail.com by December 15, 2024. Submissions should include full name, preferred pronouns, level of study, name of institution (if applicable), title, abstract, bio, and a 3-5 item bibliography. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by the end of January.

Any questions should be addressed to csgraduatestudentunion@gmail.com.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts and welcoming you to the University of Toronto this spring!

Best wishes,
Cinema Studies Graduate Conference Coordinators

Appel à Contributions: EXIT SIGNS

EXIT SIGNS (les enseignes de sortie) constituent une double contrainte provocante. L’icône signifie un avertissement et, en même temps, évoque un espace caché imaginé, une voie à suivre, ou une issue. Dans son essai de 1983 intitulé « Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ? », Michel Foucault reprend une question posée deux siècles plus tôt par Emmanuel Kant portant sur l’enseigne de sortie (Ausgang) en tant que scène de décision politique. Il s’agit de ce moment de pause, qui précède l’acte de choisir, que Kant considère à l’origine comme étant le coeur du projet des Lumières. En effet, au-delà de Foucault et de Kant, la sortie en tant que scène a été—et continue d’être—saisie par les cinéastes tout comme les écrivains, qui ont vu dans ce moment de transit le caractère poignant de la liminalité de ces signaux. Ceux-ci promettent des futurs qui sont intangibles et qui s’éloignent continuellement dans une cascade d’impasses spéculatives.

Les cinéastes sont depuis longtemps fascinés par l’enseigne de sortie. Ce symbole exaltant se manifeste littéralement, comme dans la course effrénée vers une sortie et une promesse d’évasion qui définit la tradition de l’horreur, mais aussi plus subtilement, dans l’engouement du cinéma pour les portes, les passages et les architectures poreuses. En fait, l’un des premiers films montre des ouvriers se déversant d’une usine Lumière—un exode face à la révolution industrielle. D’un point de vue extradiégétique, les indications de sortie définissent également l’expérience de regarder un film. Il suffit de penser aux lumières rouges et vertes qui illuminent les salles de cinéma du monde entier—le seul point d’ancrage à la réalité— alors que les images animées et clignotantes transportent le public. C’est le signal de sortie qui nous empêche de nous immerger complètement dans la diégèse, compliquant ainsi les théories de l’identification spectatorielle. Lorsque les lumières se rallument et que les spectateurs quittent le cinéma, comment les sorties, souligné dans « En sortant du cinéma » par Roland Barthes, nous coupent-elles de l’expérience cinématographique ? Les sorties sont elles-mêmes un élément visuel essentiel des films. De plus, l’enseigne de sortie en tant que pilier cinématographique peut être considérée de manière encore plus abstraite. Que ce soit dans la pratique cinématographique, le fait d’être spectateur ou la recherche, ces signaux ouvrent de nouvelles voies de réflexion sur les présences, les absences, l’histoire et l’avenir. Cette qualité imaginative de la cinématographie permet aux spécialistes du cinéma de retracer le passé et de spéculer sur l’avenir. En même temps, le panneau de sortie peut honorer l’interdiction d’image de l’utopie, signalant le seuil même du connaissable et du pensable, délimitant les scènes de décision qui refusent d’être déformées par la violence de la spéculation. Abordée de cette manière, cette ouverture, cette qualité imaginative du cinéma, est-ce que le Panneau de Sortie met en garde, car il ne fait guère plus que proposer des histoires réconciliées et rassurer avec des images apaisantes de futurs désirables—comme Adorno écrit, « à condition que le monde reste le même, toutes les images de réconciliation, paix et silence est aussi une image de la mort ». Au lieu de cela, la Sortie qui appelle notre attention ici est la bouche ouverte du cinéma exigeant que les choses soient différentes, mais n’offrant rien au-delà des horizons impénétrables de la négation, la seule « possibilité d’un monde qui n’existe pas ».

À l’occasion de l’édition 2025 du colloque des étudiants diplômés, le Cinema Studies Institute à l’Université de Toronto recherche des propositions qui tentent de trouver des moyens de sortir. En d’autres termes, nous nous intéressons aux articles traitant de la manière dont l’espoir, le nihilisme et les utopies interagissent thématiquement par l’entremise des images et des cultures visuelles. Bien que ces themes semblent, à première vue, antithétiques, l’exploration de leurs convergences et de leurs affinités constitue une intervention importante dans le débat scientifique contemporain. Qu’en est-il de la relation unique du cinéma avec la spéculation, la construction des mondes et la capacité de visualiser des possibilités ? Comment le désir et l’espoir jouent-ils un rôle dans la conception cinématographique des sorties, des évasions, des formes de départ—et où ? Qu’il s’agisse d’une approche philosophique, d’un retour au travail de Adorno et de Kant, d’un examen d’un objet textuel spécifique, ou même d’une pratique créative de construction, nous sommes empressés à interagir avec un large éventail de conceptions des sorties. C’est peut-être en trouvant une issue que l’on peut trouver une voie d’accès. Les sujets peuvent inclure, mais ne sont pas limités : accélérationnisme; Afro- pessimisme; altérité et différence; clôtures et résolutions; continuités et discontinuités; « cruel optimism »; décliner et décadence; désir; érotisme et éros; durabilité; l’événement et ses représentations; l’espoir et progrès; études décoloniales; fugitivité et ingouvernabilité; futurités; hapticité; imaginaires apocalyptique et postapocalyptique; médias d’évasion; migration et diaspora; nihilisme; nostalgie; opacité et disparition; ordre et désordre; le pensable et l’impensable; pénurie et absence; potentialités; le réalisme capitaliste; réforme, révolution et révolte; le refus et la dialectique; les sous-communs; temps statique et dynamique; théories des archives; théorie queer; la transformation et la réparation; les utopies et dystopies; vérité et réconciliation.

Format de la conférence : Cette conférence se déroule dans un format unique en collaboration avec une conférence de diplômés simultanée, « SIGNS OF EXIT », au Centre for Comparative Literature de l’Université de Toronto. Vous pouvez postuler soit à « EXIT SIGNS », soit à « SIGNS OF EXIT », mais pas les deux. Dans le but de susciter une enquête interdisciplinaire sur la sortie (exits), certains panels thématiques incluront des participants des études cinématographiques et de la littérature comparée. Les présentateurs disposeront de 15 à 20 minutes pour partager leurs travaux, suivies d’une période de questions modérée. Les langues de travail seront l’anglais et le français.

Nous acceptons des soumissions francophones et anglophones d’étudiants aux cycles supérieurs et chercheurs indépendants de partout dans le monde. Les parties intéressées doivent soumettre un bref résumé (300-500 mots), ainsi qu’une brève biographie de 50-100 mots à csgraduatestudentunion@gmail.com jusqu’au 15 décembre 2024. Les acceptations de la conférence seront envoyées avant la fin de janvier. Toute question doit être adressée à csgraduatestudentunion@gmail.com.

Nous avons hâte de recevoir vos résumés et de vous accueillir à l’Université de Toronto ce printemps !

Cordialement,
Coordinateurs de la conférence des études cinématographiques

Call for Papers
5th Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference

“Rise of the Machines”

Toronto, Canada

May 23-24, 2025

Recent breakthroughs in generative AI technology have once again drawn attention to cinema’s ongoing identity crisis. In the digital epoch, under what Davide Panagia calls the algorithm dispositif or what Shane Denson refers to as post-cinema, we increasingly encounter moving images that are preformatted for our consumption by artificial metabolic processes beyond human understanding. Where once computers seemed to serve as tools of communication, information processing and entertainment, ushering in an era of liberation for humanity from needless toil, some now fear the overtaking of human intellect by autonomous artificial thought. Critics of AI contend that with the rise of “intelligent” machines that mediate our view of the world we become interpassive subjects (Robert Pfaller) that delegate our cognitive and emotional labour: AI driven algorithms shape the social and political sphere in our staid. Without the ability to experience the world for ourselves, these algorithms and machines are poised to carry the burden of our former humanity.

There are some resonances in such concerns with earlier arguments in film theory about the ways that the cinematographic apparatus (Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz) constructs and positions spectators as passive viewing subjects within the dominant ideology. On the other hand, classical film theorists like André Bazin and Stanley Cavell once praised the cinema precisely for its ability to reproduce the world automatically, showing us a proof of the reality outside our mind’s biased projections – a necessary condition for any democratic society. Similarly, Walter Benjamin believed in the power of cinema’s machinery to reveal the optical unconscious of modern mass societies and thereby counter the alienation and atomization produced by industrial capitalism.

A question emerges: Is AI-mediated post-cinema still for a human audience or is the target of its uncanny images the machine vision of what Daniel Chavez Heras calls computational spectatorship?

Similarly, are Silicon Valley technocrats dreaming of total digital surveillance in the metaverse the extenders of democracy, or they the harbingers of a techno-feudalism that subjugates connectively mutated neuro-workers (Franco Berardi)?

In the end, are human beings the authors, actors and agents of the post-cinematic age or are they losing their autonomy to the automatic subjectivity of capital (Karl Marx) taking a cinematic form?

For the 5th edition of the Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference, we welcome contributions from scholars, artists and practitioners for 20 minute presentations on cinema and automation, machines and artificial intelligence including (but not limited to) topics like:

• Algorithmic cinemas • Animation and AI and/or Automation • Science fiction and AI • Surveillance and cinema • The old/new crisis of cinema • Interpassivity vs. interactivity • Techno-feudalism as paradigm • The cinematic mode of production • Machine vision in cinema and media • Neuro-work and connective mutation • Post-cinema and discorrelated images • Cybernetics and moving image media • Legacies of utopian and dystopian modernisms • Interface, screens (e.g., Galloway: Interface Effect) • Human vs. non-human agency in moving image media • Military applications of AI linked to cinema and gaming • Legacies of automatism (Surrealism, Cavell) in film and theory • The “reality-based community” and investments in observational media • Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” and its relevance to film and media theory • The “intimacy” of AI and devices in everyday life consumption of moving images • Sex Machines / Macho Machines (sexuality, gender, and machines in visual culture)

Our confirmed Keynote Speaker is Shane Denson, Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University. Denson is the author of Post- Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), Discorrelated Images (Duke University Press, 2020), Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag/ Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014) and Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013).

The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada at OCAD University on Friday, May 23 and Saturday, May 24, 2025.

Please send a 350-word abstract, bibliography (5 max.), 5 keywords, and short biography (with institutional affiliation, if applicable) in ONE DOCUMENT as an EMAIL ATTACHMENT
to spiralfilmphilosophy@gmail.com by Feb. 15, 2025. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent promptly via email.

Conference Registration Fee:
Conference Attendance: $120 (Canadian) Graduate Students and Underemployed: $60 (Canadian)
Conference Website: spiralfilmphilosophy.ca
Facebook:@spiralphilosophy
For inquiries contact: spiralfilmphilosophy@gmail.com

Organized by:
The Spiral Collective
in collaboration with
Visual and Critical Studies program, Faculty of Arts & Science, OCAD University York University

Call for Papers
(version française ci-bas)

Special issue of Canadian Journal of Film Studies/ Revue Canadienne d’études cinématographiques
Crawley Films and the Mid-Century Industry and Imagination of Canadian Sponsored Media

Issue editors, Charles Acland (c.acland@concordia.ca) and Liz Czach (liz.czach@ualberta.ca)

Ottawa-based Crawley Films was a prolific and award-winning private film producer for decades. Working in multiple genres, its films shaped the audiovisual landscape of Canadian schools, workplaces, community halls, and television. This special issue of CJFS/RCEC seeks historical research that examines the impact and significance of Crawley Films’ government- and corporate-sponsored productions. With a non-exclusive focus on 1945-1975, we are especially interested in research that deals with under-appreciated titles. While the focus may be on specific films, essays can be about distribution, production, exhibition, or any media format. Topics may include institutionally-situated studies of representation and discourses of gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, colonialism, extractivism, and modernity. Our aim is to use Crawley Films as a point of departure for a critical discussion of the cultural formations – and the associated hierarchies and exclusions – of mid-century Canada.

Submissions can take the form of short scholarly essays (3,500-4,500 words including citational apparatus) as well as archival materials or other creative interventions with Crawley Films that might be suitable for the journal’s Ciné-Forum section.

Proposals should be approximately 300 words, accompanied by a short bio, and a bibliography.

Please send proposals to Charles Acland (c.acland@concordia.ca) and Liz Czach (liz.czach@ualberta.ca) by December 2, 2024

Accepted proposals will be notified by December 9, 2024

Completed essays will be due March 3, 2025

Appel à contributions

Numéro special: Canadian Journal of Film Studies/ Revue Canadienne d’études cinématographiques
Crawley Films et l’industrie du milieu du siècle et l’imagination des médias publicitaires canadiens

Rédacteurs du numéro, Charles Acland (c.acland@concordia.ca) et Liz Czach (liz.czach@ualberta.ca)

Crawley Films, d’Ottawa, a été un producteur de films privé prolifique et primé pendant des décennies. Travaillant dans de multiples genres, ses films ont façonné le paysage audiovisuel des écoles, des lieux de travail, des salles communautaires et de la télévision canadiennes. Ce numéro spécial du CJFS/RCEC recherche des études historiques qui examinent l’impact et la signification des productions de Crawley Films parrainées par le gouvernement et les entreprises. En nous concentrant non exclusivement sur la période 1945-1975, nous nous intéressons particulièrement aux recherches portant sur des titres sous-estimés. Bien que l’accent puisse être mis sur des films spécifiques, les essais peuvent porter sur la distribution, la production, la projection, ou tout autre format médiatique. Les sujets peuvent inclure des études institutionnelles sur la représentation et les discours sur le genre, la sexualité, l’indigénéité, le colonialisme, l’extractivisme et la modernité. Notre objectif est d’utiliser Crawley Films comme point de départ pour une discussion critique sur les formations culturelles – et les hiérarchies et exclusions associées – du Canada du milieu du siècle.

Les soumissions peuvent prendre la forme de courts essais scientifiques (3 500 à 4 500 mots, appareil de citation compris) ainsi que de documents d’archives ou d’autres interventions créatives avec Crawley Films qui pourraient convenir à la section Ciné-Forum de la revue.

Les propositions doivent contenir environ 300 mots, accompagnées d’une courte biographie et d’une bibliographie.

Veuillez envoyer vos propositions à Charles Acland (c.acland@concordia.ca) et Liz Czach (liz.czach@ualberta.ca) d’ici le 2 décembre 2024.

Les propositions acceptées seront notifiées avant le 9 décembre 2024
Les essais terminés seront rendus le 3 mars 2025

CALL FOR PAPER PROPOSALS

Minority Identities and Vernacular Visual Culture. Interdisciplinary symposium
Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago
May 9-10, 2025
Deadline for proposals: December 10, 2024

Minority groups are often underrepresented in official archives, which has resulted in their continuing marginalization in historiography. Critical archive scholars argue for empowering such groups by developing and investigating archival collections. This symposium intends to expand this approach by demonstrating how the visual practices of underrepresented groups can be studied through underutilized data sources. To this end, the symposium will focus on diaspora communities seen through their visual production with the presumption that the vernacular representations of everyday life can provide substantial insights into evolving minority identities. Therefore, we want to explore the interplay of vernacular visual practices and the transformations of minority identities by posing two broad research questions: What is the role of vernacular visual practice in shaping minority identities? How does looking at identity through vernacular images challenge pervasive representations of minority groups?
Vernacular visual culture—commonplace, ordinary, or everyday images that people make and use—provides a rich set of material for the study of the culture of underrepresented groups. Yet, too often these materials are overlooked. As noted by Patricia Zimmerman, in the context of home movies, in popular imaginary, these images “are often defined by negation: noncommercial, nonprofessional, unnecessary.” Vernacular images were historically often considered subordinate; however, they constitute an essential corpus of sources produced “from below” by the community members. Our initial inquiry shows these marginal media forms can reveal depreciated or repressed histories that have failed to gain mainstream representation. One of the symposium’s key goals is to recognize the possibilities these sources offer in the context of writing “history from below.”

The symposium aims to map the uses and meanings of vernacular visual practices in relation to minority identities, with a particular focus on black and diaspora communities. We invite scholars working on different media and genres to address the question of the role and meaning of vernacular visual culture with minorities’ identities.
The symposium will be held in person only at The Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, May 9-10, 2025. Participation in the symposium is free (there is no registration fee). Travel/accommodation support will be available for a limited number of presenters without access to institutional funding.

We request that proposals be received no later than Tuesday, December 10, 2024, at 11:59 pm (AoE). If you are interested in presenting, please email Agata Zborowska (azborowska@uchicago.edu) with the following details:

• paper title,
• abstract of 300-500 words,
• short bio of 200-300 words,
• information on whether you want/need to apply for funding for travel/accommodation costs.

Accepted presenters are asked to submit their paper (or final draft) at least two weeks before the symposium date.

The symposium organizers
Agata Zborowska, University of Chicago, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and University of Warsaw
Eleonory Gilburd, Department of History, University of Chicago
Allyson Nadia Field, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago

Call for Chapter Proposals – Refocus: The Films of Agnès Varda
Edited by Melissa Oliver-Powell and Natasha Farrell

• Deadline for proposals: November 29, 2024
• Notification of acceptance: December 17, 2024
• Deadline for chapters: September 20, 2025

Renowned for her innovation, independence, and uniquely eclectic style, it is hard to overstate the importance of Agnès Varda's place in film history, which spans multiple genres, forms and movements. The rich legacy of her work continues to be felt in recent exhibitions, retrospectives, and across university film curricula worldwide. However, for many of her 65 years as a filmmaker she was treated as a footnote, regulated to the shadows of her male New Wave counterparts. In the early 1980s, she spoke about being omitted from the history books and special issues of Cahiers du Cinéma. These omissions began to be redressed in the late 20th century with the publication of seminal monographs on Varda’s work in the ’90s. Later volumes have continued to cement her significance as a unique and vital artist, often focusing on particular aspects of her style, and interweaving her work as a photographer and plasticienne in her later career. 

The proposed Refocus volume will contribute to the growing body of scholarship on Varda with a holistic overview of her film work, bringing together new critical perspectives throughout the diverse stages of her career in cinema. Across the board, we are interested in prioritizing approaches and frameworks that are relevant to but have been underserved within work on Varda. This proposed volume will seek to contextualize, problematise, and theorise her entire canon to further spotlight how Varda’s films are not a cinema of the obvious. They do not fit neatly into boxes, including a feminist one, even while unmistakably feminist. We welcome proposals for chapters offering fresh perspectives on all aspects of Varda’s cinema and its legacy, whether on specific films or periods of her filmmaking, themes across her work, or the influence of Varda on other filmmakers. We are particularly keen to see – but are not limited to – proposals on the following topics:

• Revisiting the early New Wave and Left Bank films in France
• Varda abroad: films from California, Cuba, Iran, and elsewhere
• New perspectives on the digital documentaries
• Varda’s influence on and intertexts with later filmmakers
• Varda’s collaborations with other artists (directors, actors, musicians, etc.)
• Varda’s collaborations with non-artist participants
• Varda the poet: her oeuvre’s relationship to photography, literature, music, etc.
• Filmmaking and or as political activism
• New or underserved theoretical approaches, including:
  • Queer theory
  • Ecocriticism
  • Animal studies
  • Linguistics
  • Medical humanities
  • Intermediality
• Care and empathy in Varda’s filmmaking
• Family and friendship in practice and representation
• Cultural events, retrospectives and film restoration

Please send chapter proposals of 250-400 words and a 100-word bio to both editors of the volume, Melissa Oliver-Powell (melissa.oliver-powell@york.ac.uk) and Natasha Farrell
(f39nf@mun.ca) by 29th November. Acceptances will be sent out by 17th December. Final chapters will be expected to be around 6000-8000 words, in English, and referenced in Chicago endnote style. We are expecting final chapters to be delivered in September 2025.

Please direct any questions to:
Melissa Oliver-Powell (melissa.oliver-powell@york.ac.uk)
Natasha Farrell (f39nf@mun.ca)