A Graduate Student Conference co-hosted by the Department of Critical Studies and the Media Arts and Practice PhD Program at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California seek conference papers and creative presentations from graduate students addressing the theme of "Translating Media." The conference is to take place on April 3-4, 2009. Submissions Due: Jan. 9 2009.
TRANSLATING MEDIA
A Graduate Student Conference co-hosted by the Department of Critical Studies and the Media Arts and Practice PhD (iMAP) Program
School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
April 3-4, 2009
Keynote Speaker: Lisa Parks, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC
Santa Barbara, author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellite and the Televisual and co-editor of
Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. She is also the producer and co-producer of an
array of media arts projects such as Experiments in Satellite Media Arts (w/ Ursula
Biemman), Loom (w/ Miha Vipotnik), Postwar Footprints and Roaming.
Artist’s Talk by: To Be Determined
The graduate students in the Department of Critical Studies and the Media Arts and
Practice (iMAP) PhD program in the School of Cinematic Arts seek conference papers
and creative presentations from graduate students addressing the theme of
"Translating Media."
‘Translation’ has gained a renewed valence within the fields of media study and arts
practice. As theoretical and creative inquiry shifts toward transmedia, transnational
and transdisciplinary approaches and renderings of the current global audiovisual
landscape, translation means more than just a linguistic exercise. Rather, the term
increasingly lends itself as a productive conceptual lens and metaphor for the
interlaced and often contradictory set of transformative processes at work when media
objects, policies, and economies traffic across geographic borders, cultural institutions,
and technological platforms. The widespread global, regional and local shifts in
cultural media practices that arise from these traversals undoubtedly call for
transdisciplinary methodologies. To address these issues, Media Studies has sought
to exchange and translate critical vocabularies among Global Critical Race Feminism,
Critical Race Theory, Ethnic Studies, Queer Theory, History, Art History, Mass
Communications, American Studies, Post Colonial Theory, and Literary and Visual
Studies. And, as many Media studies scholars seek to produce more than just textual
representations of their research, the translation of theory into audiovisual practice has
more frequently become an alternative mode of scholarship. We thus feel that
translation is a critical keyword that speaks in diverse ways to media cultures, Media
Studies and a growing body of scholar-practitioners who both thematize translation in
their media art and seek for new translative possibilities in their creative processes. We
have chosen ‚ÄúTranslating Media‚Ä? as the title for the conference to foreground media‚Äôs
translation as an ongoing process. And we believe the expansive deployment of the
term will invite an exciting array of creative interpretations and theoretical positions.
We invite submissions for 20-minute papers, 20-minute creative project presentations,
or pre-constituted panels of no more than four presenters that consider the stakes of
‘translating media’ from diverse methodological, disciplinary and creative approaches.
Panels that include both critical and creative presentations or that enact a productive
dialogue of theory and practice are especially encouraged.
Topics to explore may include, but are not restricted to:
- the various implications of media and cultural convergence
- how media policies translate into labor relations and practices
- the problems that arise when incorporating media theory into media art practice, and
translating a media art project into a gallery space, social space, institutional space,
etc.
- the rise of transmedia storytelling and media that are experienced on multiple
platforms including mobile devices, urban screens, game environments, etc.
- ongoing tensions around the status of narrative in linear vs. interactive media and the
problems of translation between games and cinema
- ideological concerns around the rise of runaway productions, co- and omnibus
productions, and transnational remakes within global film industries
- the traffic of global television ‘formats’ and/or ‘canned shows’ across national
borders and media systems
- issues pertaining to linguistic translations through subtitling and dubbing
- questions pertaining to the archive: how translation between film, analog, digital and
textual media affect archival institutions; what kinds of issues do we still face with
archival research, especially if that archive is in a different language?
- the translation of programming languages and code into critical theories of media,
and vice versa
- the difficulties and possibilities presented when media scholarship travels and
converses across the Humanities
Selected papers will be included in a special conference-themed issue of Spectator,
the University of Southern California's Journal of Film and Television Criticism, and
selected media projects may also be included on the School of Cinematic Arts website.
For individual submissions, please send abstracts or project descriptions of 300 words
or less and a brief biographical or artist statement. Links to images or media files are
encouraged but not required. For panels, please submit a 300-word panel description
and a 300-word abstract for each panelist's paper.! Please do not send large media
files as e-mail attachments. Presentations requiring special technological setup will be
considered on a case-by-case basis; these technological needs should be detailed in
the proposal. Send all submissions to usc.translating.media@gmail.com
Deadline for submissions: January 9th, 2009.
Please feel free to address any questions or comments to Patty Ahn at pahn@usc.edu.
