Conference Call for Papers

Material Environments: Sensing Time and Matter in Digital and Visual Culture
July 24th-25th 2015
University of Greenwich, London
This conference seeks to explore the points of intersection at which the material and
the digital, matter and the virtual, and embodiment and posthumanism push against
each other in visual media. Through encounters with cinema, artists film and video,
installations, and online archives, the aim of the conference is to conceive of new
relationships between temporality, materiality and affectivity, tracing the ways in
which matter becomes meaningful, or comes to resist meaning, in the digital age. We
hope to illuminate the new ways in which digital experiences allow us to think and
sense matter and materiality, while reassessing the role of non-digital media in this
equation. The conference will trace the implications of the posthuman turn in the
humanities, understood as encompassing a variety of non-anthropocentric approaches,
on our understanding of matter and affect in visual culture.
The Conference particularly welcomes papers that explore the following:

the relationship between image and environment, the materiality of filmed

nature, and the ecological turn in theory and philosophy
non-anthropocentric and posthuman approaches to visual media, particularly
as they affect our understanding of materiality, mortality, and ethics
the relationship between posthumanism, materiality and embodiment
the ways in which the digital has reconfigured our understanding of
temporality, spatiality, memory and archiving
the impact of the digital on engagements with non-linear storytelling and
locative narratives.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Professor Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London
http://www.joannazylinska.net/
Professor David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow
http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/staff/davidmartin-jones/
Dr Felicity Colman, Manchester School of Art
http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/fcolman
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by 18th April to:
calls@timadi.org with Material Environments in the subject line.
This Conference is sponsored by the Time, Materiality and the Digital (TiMaDi)
research group at the University of Greenwich, and organised by Matilda Mroz, Isil
Onol, Stacey Pitsillides, and Rosamund Davies.