[UPDATE] [SCMS 2016 CFP] Spaces of Spectatorship: Architectures of the Projected Image

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Swagato Chakravorty / Yale University

The dispositif of the moving and projected image, defying its ossification under the weight of seventies-era apparatus theory, has returned to prominence. Screen architectures and moving-image installations have characterized a large-scale reconfiguration and reimagination of the dispositifs of cinema in the decades leading from the late twentieth into the early twenty-first century. The architecture of the moving and projected image has been at the center of this renewed focus on the dispositif. Scholarly accounts too often try to retroject works from this period into a genealogy rooted in the discourse of American Minimalist art (and related phenomenological concerns), or else recycle an older rhetoric of immersive spectatorship and theories of the spectacle.

This panel hopes to counter these tendencies and to move toward historicizing and theorizing the architectural life of the moving and projected image. This emphasis builds upon the recent work of François Albera and Maria Tortajada, who have recovered the cinematic dispositif to underscore its architectural connotations ("…a spatial organization of elements, mechanical or not, producing a specific position for an observer, user, or spectator"). From the exhibition space of the Phantasmagoria (which Thomas Elsaesser suggests can be considered a precursor to installation art) to the transparent projections and atmospheric theaters of cinema's early decades, through the emergence of paracinematic installations and the moving image's passage into museal and gallery spaces, the experience of the moving and projected image has in a sense always been structured by its architectural setting. The proliferation of large-scale screen architectures, audiovisual installations, light festivals, and "media architecture" around the turn of the twentieth century insists that we (re-)turn to the architectures of the moving and projected image.

Although this panel's concerns are motivated by works emerging in the post-1990s period, it welcomes papers spanning the history of the moving and projected image that emphasize its spaces and architectures of display, circulation, spectatorship, and experience. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Architectures of the moving and projected image before 1895: Phantasmagoria, architectural illumination, urban/public projections, etc.

- Architectures of early cinema: apéritifs-cinéma, transparent projections, atmospheric theaters, etc.

- Visionary or realized architectures of expanded cinema/expanded cinema installations: Stan Vanderbeek's Moviedrome, multi-screen installations at the 1964 World's Fair, Gregory Markopoulos' Eniaios and the Temenos, Paul Sharits' "locational" films, etc.

- Post-1990s relocation of the moving image: architectural projection mapping, light festivals, holographic projections, screen architectures in galleries and museums, etc.

Please email an abstract (250-300 words), title, list of works cited (3-5 sources), and brief author bio (500 characters) to Swagato Chakravorty at swagato.chakravorty@yale.edu by August 12. All proposals will be responded to by August 15. Please email with any questions.