THE ATEMPORAL IMAGE
Location: Plymouth University, UK
Date: 1, 2, 3 July, 2016
“He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of
his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A
shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into
stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An
oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off
into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic
pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it’s alive.”
(Phillip K Dick. 1969)
Our contemporary quotidian lives are becoming increasingly indebted to
virtual platforms for social exchange and cultural mediation. The
ubiquity of social media has necessitated the birth of virtual
graveyards; frozen digital reliquaries marking the cessation of our
online busywork. Museums and culture conservationists are hurriedly
digitising material fragments of the Anthropocene in an anxious
contest against time and entropy. In this world the family photo-album
is no longer an object but a well pool of dematerialised data.
· To what extent has time’s unrelenting persecution of matter
and, by historical virtue of necessity, culture, been circumvented in
the digital age?
· What is time to the dematerialised image?
· Does the cloud and distributed data networks shift the agency
of time as it shifts the image?
· Has the duration of the gaze been supplanted by a sequence of
fleeting glances as the mechanics of our biological bodies struggle
clumsily to fix upon a new frenetic landscape of hypermediated
imagery?
The figurative freezing of digital data is a far cry from the
corporeal terminus we have historically conceived of as death. In its
epitaphic state even the digital graveyard is full of life; of
reading, relaying and revival. Even these (a)temporarily static fields
of data serve to nourish a complex bio-digital ecology that
decomposes, blooms and flourishes in a new non-terrestrial time,
unbound by the phenomenal cycles of the stars. The age of information
has given rise to a new breed of temporality whereby nothing ever dies
but is only defrag’d, retrieved, restored and remixed. The
Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference is calling for papers that
explore how this new temporality informs and plays out across
contemporary visual culture.
Participants are asked to address aspects of the atemporal at least
one of the following areas:
the still image
the immersive image
the sound as image
hypermediacy and the iconic character of the image
politics of the image and/or image making in a transdisciplinary context
life sciences and bioart in relation to the living image
distributed and networked image
The trans-scalar image(inary), from the nano to the astronomical image
Artificial and computer vision
moving still
image as time, real-time and glitch-time
archival, permanency and immediacy
aesthetics and proliferation of the image
The conference invites papers that respond to the above provocation in
areas related to: Media Arts, Painting, Drawing, Curating,
Installation, Film, Video, Photography, Computer/data
Visualization/sonification, Real-time Imaging, Intelligent Systems and
Image Science.
Keynotes:
Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture
Arthur I. Miller is Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film And Television at Goldsmiths, University of London
Timing and Duration:
Conference will be held over three days from July 1, 2, 3 2016
Location:
i-DAT / Plymouth University
Roland Levinsky Building,
Drake Circus, Plymouth,
PL48AA, Devon, UK
Conference email: transimage2016@gmail.com
Conference website: www.transimage.i-DAT.org
____________________________________
Associate Professor Paul Thomas
Program Director Fine Art Honors
UNSW | Art & Design
UNSW Australia
Paddington Campus
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd,
Paddington, NSW 2021
(cnr Greens Rd and Oxford St)
PO Box 259 Paddington,
NSW 2021, Australia.
tel 61.2.8936 0817
Director Collaborative Research in Art, Science and Humanity (CRASH)
Director Studio for Transdisciplinary Arts Research
Media Art History Board Member
i-Dat Board Member
