International Symposium in Visual Culture
Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey

Faculty of Communications, Department of Photography and Video
May 20-21, 2011
Deadline: 31.3.2011

Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture, the first of a series of international symposia on visual culture to be held at Bahçeşehir University, İstanbul, aims to enable discussion and debate on topics critical in the conceptualization, analysis, evaluation of and intervention in visual culture today.

Once apparently marginal, critical debate in visual culture over mobility, actual, virtual and imaginary, has become crucial to formulating positions both in relation to changes in communications technologies and in social and political relations. Digital visual technologies, it is claimed, have multiplied the sites of viewing, shifting audiences from positions of passive receptivity, associated with discourses of modern visual culture, into a series of modes of interaction. Yet, it is also argued that the encoding of kinaesthetic responsiveness in such forms of interaction represents a more thorough penetration of imaginative activities than ever before.

Contributions are thus sought from scholars working in visual studies, in the history and theory of art, photographic, film, video and/or media studies that engage with issues of actual, virtual and imaginary modes of mobility in relation to images, still, moving and interactive, across modern and/or postmodern frameworks. We are particularly interested in ways in which the thinking of mobility in visual culture implicates issues of boundaries, borders and limits and, given the situation of the University overlooking Asian from European Istanbul, we invite contributions that concern that critical form of actual and imaginary mobility, orientalism, along with neo-orientalist variants and modes of resistant counter-orientalist practice. Contributions that address dominant, but also repressed, residual and/or emergent senses of space are also encouraged.

Further priorities may emerge from a range of topics that include the following:

Histories and theorizations of mobile spectatorship, e.g. flaneurism, the dérive, lines of flight
Mass and other forms of mobilization
Figures of immobility in accounts of modern and/or postmodern mass culture, e.g. spectacle and passivity
Monocularity, binocularity and complexifications of perspectival space
Forms of surveillance and counter-surveillance
Temporality and movement in film and video
Territoriality, deterritorialization, reterritorialization and the image
Intra-corporeal and endoscopic visualities
Satellite and network visualities
Simulation and mobility
New media, mobility and fantasy
Digital interactivity, kinaesthesia and the image
Mobility and fantasy in gaming
Mobile screen visualities, fantasy and sociability
Histories and theorizations of mobile authorship
Reading mobile corporeality across visual forms
Transgression and mobility
Theorising fantasy, identification and mobility
Distanciation and mobility
Posing, performativity and mobility
Borders, boundaries, limits and mobility

The symposium will seek to formulate useful positions in thinking the history and futures of visual culture, modes of critical engagement with the increasing variety of visual technologies, in particular mobile ones, and the problematics of actual and imaginary mobility in relation to rhetorics and actualities of globalization.

The symposium will involve 5 or 6 consecutive sessions of three 25 minute papers, and 5 concurrent sessions of five 15 minute papers. Currently it is envisaged that there will be sessions, of both longer and shorter presentations, on: still images; moving images; interactive images; fantasy and mobility; and borders, boundaries and limits.

Please send proposals of up to 350 words indicating which session your presentation would be best suited and whether the presentation would be for 25 or for 15 minutes (or whether it could be either) to mobilityandfantasy@gmail.com.

Travel and accommodation assistance is available for contributors under 35 years of age, up to a maximum of 350 TL [approx. 160 Є] so please also indicate if you wish to be considered for financial support.

Contact: Lewis Johnson or Tolga Hepdinçler
Bahçeşehir University
Faculty of Communication
Department of Photography and Video
Cırağan Caddesi, Beşiktaş
34353 Istanbul
Turkey
+90 212 381 0446 or 0765

Symposium website: mfvc@bahcesehir.edu.tr
contact email: mobilityandfantasy@gmail.com

Mahmut CINAR
Bahcesehir University
Communication Faculty
Dept. of Journalism
Ciragan Cad. No: 4-6
34353 Besiktas – Istanbul – TURKEY
Tel: +90 (212) 381 03 99
Fax: +90 (212) 381 04 00
english.bahcesehir.edu.tr