(on behalf of organisers)
Call for Papers
Conference on Technovisuality and Cultural Reenchantment
21-22 November 2008
Co-Organized by Chinese University of Hong Kong & Hong Kong Shue Yan University
http://www.hksyu.edu/english/2008Techno/home.html
Daily life is increasingly mediated by technology and remorseless
visual stimuli in everyday technovisual forms have now become the very
incarnation of what it means to be human. While technovisuality
points to the visual as object and site of social interaction, it is
also very much about embodiment and how we transform information and
knowledge (infoledge) into material and aesthetic forms. Bergson
thinks of the body itself as an image among other images, hence the
theory of perception as affect (Hansen). Such a process of technical
and biological symbiosis entails cultural reenchantment, which takes
place where nature and nurture overlap, where becomings through
circuits of intensity occur between humans and machines, humans and
nonhumans.
Think of cinematography, digital images in all media, video games,
scientific data visualization, virtual environments - all could be
summed up as manifestations of the Figural (Rodowick). Together they
encapsulate an epoch of hybridity in a wide range of interactive
experiences, in which technovisuality programs more and more
intelligence into the very fabric of a new ecology of wonders. Images
are now thought to be able to think and to have desires themselves
(Mitchell).
Within the spaces of visuality, cultural re-enchantment also points to
eco-consciousness, warning us of our ecological violence, requiring
the re-enchantment of nature by recovering a sense of the sacred as a
means of survival. Here, Latour's network, Prigogine's affirmation of
the fabulous in the nature of swerving matter, the quantum enigma in
new physics, might be drawn upon in leading us towards what Laszlo
calls the re-enchantment of the cosmos.
There is nothing unnatural about technology; and like cyberpunk,
technology is certainly us. Hence technology does not have to limit
itself to those "technological devices" that Heidegger is wary of. In
a sense, visualization has always been technological since the
beginning of time as a kind of primordial mechanism which has,
according to Heidegger, not too much to do with "the technological."
Here oriental philosophy provides an alternative perspective of how
cultural reenchantment can be tied to technovision in a broad sense.
Suggested themes:
1. Cinematography's magical world, and the camera's eye.
2. Technovisuality and enchantment in mediated visualization.
3. The history and development of digital images and the way
"nuanced" relationship is established between human and nonhuman.
4. Technovisuality, science and philosophy
5. Imagescape as a new ecology
6. On-line gaming as spectacular show case of cultural enchantment
7. Classical Eastern philosophy and contemporary theories of
visualization: an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach.
8. Science fiction and film as artifact of cultural reenchantment.
9. Architecture and virtuality
10. Virtual life
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 4th April
Conference website: http://www.hksyu.edu/english/2008Techno/home.html
Conference email address: [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]
Conference Committee:
Prof. WONG Kin-yuen
Professor and Head
Department of English Language & Literature
Director
Technoscience Culture Research and Development Centre
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
email: [log in to unmask]
Prof. Helen GRACE
Associate Professor
Department of Cultural and Religious Studies
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
email: [log in to unmask]
Dr. Amy CHAN Kit-sze
Assistant Professor
Department of English Language & Literature
Associate Director
Technoscience Culture Research and Development Centre
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
email: [log in to unmask]
|