The International Visual Sociology Association’s annual 2012 meeting is in New York, July 6-9th. You can see the call for papers here. Perhaps if inVisio members are going they could reply to this post and hook up at the conference – it would also be great if you anyone going could email swarren@essex.ac.uk so I can equip you with promotional inVisio materials to litter the coffee break hall with!
“Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir founded the ecoarttech collaborative in 2005 in order to explore environmental issues and convergent media and technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, including art, digital studies, philosophy, literature, and eco-criticism. For ecoarttech, the term “environment” does not refer only to nature or geographic spaces; rather, we understand it as part of an interwoven network of biological, cultural, mental, and digital spaces, and we imagine the health of each as indistinguishable from the health of others. In the words of Gregory Bateson, the planet is part of humans’ “eco-mental system”: “if Lake Erie is driven insane [by pollution], its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.”"
There are lots of blogs on photography out there – I call attention to 2 that I find interesting, both are based in Rochester.
(Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography, curated by James Johnson
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/
A thousand words – Kodak’s official blog, Jenny Cisney, Chief Blogger
The BBC, YouTube and Ridley Scott are combining forces to make a grass-roots documentary about life in the UK using videos made and uploaded by ordinary British folk. The YouTube website with instructions on how to take part is http://www.youtube.com/britaininaday
This is an extension of the recently aired 90 minute “Life in a Day” on the BBC – a mash up of video captured on 24th July 2010 by people all over the world. Provocative, touching, shocking, mundane but above all powerful - I found this compelling viewing, so well worth a watch on YouTube or BBC iplayer (if you are in the UK) if you can. Apart from the end results of these types of project being fabulous pieces of documentary film-making, I think they are intriguing collaborations between traditional and ‘new media’ visual production organizations – are these perfect examples of the democratization of broadcasting and film production or a colonization of previously viral and ‘less organized’ visual culture channels?
Saturday, 12 November 2011 from 14.00 to 15.30 GMT an online workshop is dedicated to visual research projects that explore issues of power: ”The Chair. Visual Encounters with Power”
Organizers: MAGMA Contemporary Medium, SEMEISTOS Web-Semiotics Research Group
Online presentations of 10-15 minutes via Skype are welcome, and/or offline written presentations of visual research projects that are aimed at exploring leadership, power, and status issues. We intend to publish these presentations as an e-book and make them available for broader audiences. A live streaming of the workshop will be available at: http://www.livestream.com/magmalive
For details, please contact Rozi Bakó at bako.rozi@gmail.com.
Jonathan Schroeder came across this interesting site the other day – lots of fascinating posts and I think you can send your work to them for publication on the blog too…. http://viz.cwrl.utexas.edu/content/about-viz
From an interesting website, Mashable, a story of the transformation of venerable British firm Burberry’s transition a ‘media company’. I have been interested in Burberry since their early 2000s rebranding, largely via black and white ’snapshot’ advertising campaigns. http://mashable.com/2011/09/21/burberry-media-fashion-company/?utm_source=iphoneapp
The 5th William A. Kern Conference on Visual Communication
Rochester Institute of Technology
May 3-5, 2012
When Images Cause Trouble: Visual Communication, Controversy, and Critical Engagement
Call for Papers
When do images cause trouble? One purpose of this conference is to discuss recent controversies in visual communication, including photojournalism, social media, advertising, and the visual arts, invoking issues of privacy, security, censorship, freedom of expression, and religious belief. In addition, as concerns over the power of images are not new, we would seek to historicize and contextualize current debates with historical perspectives, including, as an illustrative example, iconoclasm and the Protestant reformation in Europe –particularly Puritan image smashing in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. Following in the tradition of Kern conferences, we plan a rich program of interdisciplinary scholarship and conversation.
We invite submissions that address this theme from multiple points of views. How does work in visual communication, visual culture, visual rhetoric, and related fields shed light on controversial issues that surround the production and consumption of images? How can we understand current events in a historical perspective? What are the roles of regulation, oversight, government, and grass roots organizations in thinking seriously about images? What roles do technologies of surveillance play? How can we think about the ethics of representation?
Individual papers, visual presentations, panels and workshop proposals are welcomed.
Send extended abstracts (500 – 2500 words) via email to Jonathan Schroeder (jesgla@rit.edu).
Jonathan E. Schroeder
William A. Kern Professor of Communications
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, New York 14623