MEDIA
MUTATIONS 2013
Ephemeral Media: Time, Persistence, and
Transience in Contemporary Screen Culture
Curated by
Sara Pesce, with Paul Grainge and Roberta Pearson
Bologna,
May, 21 and 22, 2013
Considering the variety of paratextual
materials that surround contemporary film and television shows, including
trailers, credit sequences, mashups, promos, podcasts, bonus materials and
merchandising, it has been suggested that ‘off-screen studies' may be needed in
order to make sense of the wealth of other entities that saturate the media,
and that construct film and television. This is part of a wider critical move
to explore the ‘ephemeral’ texts that exist beyond, below and between the principal
entertainment content of media corporations. This symposium looks at the status
and significance of paratextual media including those associated with ‘primary’
film and television texts but also promotional texts associated with
corporations or events (e.g. the Olympics) and fan produced paratexts related
to films, television shows, games, media icons and the like. Considering these paratexts raises issues
ranging from the increasing role that short-form content has assumed in media
culture to the way that platforms like YouTube have enabled paratexts from the
past to become more permanent and accessible by vastly increasing the
opportunities for their distribution and remediation.
This focus on paratexts gives rise to broader
concerns with the temporalities of media within the digital environment, and
specifically the duration and circulation of media objects. New
regimes of memory and attention may be arising within the digital mediascape. On
the one hand, the growth of digital channels and platforms has seen a
proliferation of temporally compressed media (those lasting seconds or minutes)
geared towards mobile audiences whose attentions are more fleeting and
dispersed. On the other hand, the rise of archives like YouTube and Google has
enabled media images and performances to live on and be shared and reworkedindefinitely by viewing communities. By focusing on the short, secondary and
seemingly insubstantial texts that fill the gaps between media, the 2013 Media
Mutations conference considers the cultural life of paratexts, and the relation
of ‘ephemeral,’ ‘peripheral’ and ‘ancillary’ media to contemporary narrative
and temporal ecologies.
The conference is interested in, but
not limited to, the following issues as they relate to paratextual media
·Media
environments – What is the
relation of paratexts to continuities/changes in the media landscape?
-
How do paratexts produce changes within media ecosystems? How do they work as
agents of stability inside media ecosystems?
·Durational
temporalities - What is the
role of short-form content within contemporary media culture?
-How are paratexts linked to corporate, media or audience strategies for
capturing attention in a world where an increasing abundance of consumer goods
is part of a cycle of ever shorter renewal and disposal?
·Circulatory
temporalities – How do
paratexts operate historically within media’s circulatory systems? Did they
operate differently in the past than in the present?
- How do paratexts,
from the present and the past, surround and shape the meaning of texts, brands
and intellectual properties?
-
What is the relationship of paratexts to processes of competition and
authentication of cultural memory, and to the nostalgia for a remembered past?
How might they relate to the discussion of the categories of the dominant, the
emergent and the residual as they have been adopted by cultural studies andmemory studies?
·Critical
methodologies – What are the
means and possibilities of studying texts that fall outside the analytic focus
of film and broadcast archives?
-
How do these new textual forms raise issues concerning their cultural
validation?
Keynote speaker Jonathan Gray, University of
Wisconsin-Madison
The organizers invite single
proposals (length not exceeding 20').
Deadline
for paper proposals: January 20, 2013
Proposals should not exceed one
page in length. Please make sure to attach a short CV (10 line max).
Submit proposals to: [log in to unmask]
Proposals will be blind
reviewed
Official languages: Italian
and English
Notification of acceptance by:
February 20, 2013
Further information about MEDIAMUTATIONS at: www.mediamutations.org
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